Project Management Masterclass
Project Management Masterclass is the podcast for project professionals who want to move beyond managing tasks and start leading projects with clarity, influence, and strategic thinking.
Hosted by Brittany Wilkins, founder of Makoway Consulting, author of Letters to My Sisters in Engineering, and creator of the emerging philosophy known as Execution Intelligence, this show explores what truly drives project success in today's increasingly complex environment.
Brittany built her career inside the gap between strategy and execution—the place where capable teams often struggle to turn plans into results. Through years of leading projects, advising organizations, and studying the leadership behaviors that separate successful initiatives from failed ones, she developed a simple belief:
Project success is rarely limited by effort. More often, it is limited by execution.
Each episode explores the principles, frameworks, power skills, and mindset required to navigate complexity, align teams, improve decision-making, and deliver meaningful outcomes. From leadership development and industry trends to lessons learned from real-world projects, Project Management Masterclass equips professionals with the tools needed to elevate their careers and lead with confidence.
Listeners come for the insight and stay for the practical perspective.
One listener shared:
"I listened during a road trip from Arkansas to Texas and was completely hooked. The content is relevant, inspiring, and genuinely memorable."
Another reflection from the same review:
"Your calm, articulate cadence makes the content accessible even for listeners who speak English as a second language."
Resources & Next Steps
Execution Intelligence Diagnostic
Identify where execution may be breaking down across leadership, decision-making, visibility, and team alignment.
https://executionintelligence.scoreapp.com/
Execution Intelligence Book Waitlist
Join the waitlist and receive updates on Brittany's upcoming book.
https://makowayconsulting.scoreapp.com
Makoway Consulting
Learn how organizations eliminate execution friction and turn strategy into measurable results.
www.makowayconsulting.com
Whether you're leading projects, programs, portfolios, or organizational change, Project Management Masterclass is designed to help you strengthen the skills that separate project managers from project leaders.
Tap into the insights. Strengthen your leadership. Execute with intention.
Project Management Masterclass
Project Success Playbook | Designing for Execution Success
This episode is only available to subscribers.
Project Management Masterclass +
Exclusive access to bonus episodes!Project Success Playbook: Designing for Execution Success
Does successful execution begin when a project starts, or long before execution ever begins?
In this episode of Project Success Playbook, I reflect on one of the most influential concepts from The 4 Disciplines of Execution: lead measures.
Rather than reviewing the book, I explore the question it challenged me to ask:
If organizations know the right lead measures, what allows people to consistently act on them?
Together, we'll explore:
The difference between lag measures and lead measures.
Why visibility is essential for execution.
How organizational systems influence execution.
Why successful execution may begin with organizational design, not just project planning.
A practical exercise to evaluate your own KPIs, dashboards, and scorecards.
This isn't a book review.
It's a conversation about execution.
If you're ready to think more deeply about leadership, organizational performance, and the systems that shape successful execution, I'd love for you to join me.
If you are ready to strengthen the skills that separate project managers from project leaders, explore the Power Skills Accelerator, a course designed to help professionals master the leadership capabilities needed to thrive in complex project environments.
Enroll in the Power Skills Accelerator
https://www.developpowerskills.com/sales-page
If you want to assess where execution may be breaking down in your current projects, take the Execution Intelligence Diagnostic to identify gaps across leadership, decision making, and team alignment.
Start the diagnostic
https://executionintelligence.scoreapp.com/
Join the waitlist for Brittany Wilkins’ upcoming book, Execution Intelligence, focused on the mindset, systems, and discipline required to turn strategy into measurable results.
Join the book waitlist
https://makowayconsulting.scoreapp.com
To learn more about how organizations eliminate execution friction and turn strategy into measurable results, visit Makoway Consulting.
https://www.makowayconsulting.com
Every Organization Pays An Execution Tax. Discover Yours:
Hello, and welcome back to Project Success Playbook.
In the last project success playbook episode. I talked about how intelligent organizations fail without collapsing based on concept described in the Bezos letters successful failure. In that Organizational decline is rarely dramatic or sudden all at once. It happens gradually, until warning signs become harder to see, risks become normalized, and status reports stay green while reality slowly turns red.
One of the conclusions I reached
We give more effort, but in most instance effort is not that problem. Its visibility.
From that conversation discussed flowed into this episode, as I begin to read another book.
I've been reading The 4 Disciplines of Execution, one of the most influential books ever written on execution. It provides timeless insights on strategy and have to tactically execute your wildly important goals the book as the book coins it.
What stood out to me was …
The book discusses the second discipline: acting on lead measures.
How do we know we're winning? How does your team know if its truly achieving project success beyond the triple constraints.
It boils down to measures.
First we have to recognize the distinction between lag measures and lead measures.
And it led me to another question. If visibility is essential for execution, what exactly should organizations be making visible? That's what I want to explore today.
Lag measures tell us whether we've achieved the goal. Revenue. Customer satisfaction. Profit. Project completion. Market share. Number of subscriptions from software downloads you let clients demo for a trial period. . These are outcomes. T
hey matter because they tell us where we ended up. But by the time we measure them, the work is already done. We can't change yesterday's revenue, last quarter's satisfaction scores, or last month's downloads. Lag measures tell us the story of yesterday.
Lead measures are different. They're the actions we can influence today that increase the likelihood of achieving tomorrow's results.
As I reflected on this, I thought about how project managers track their own work. It's easy to fixate on schedule variance or the percentage complete on a status report.
Those numbers matter, but they're lag measures. A project manager can't change last week's schedule variance.
What they can influence is whether risks get logged the moment they're identified, whether stakeholders get updated before they have to ask, whether blockers get escalated within a day instead of sitting in someone's inbox, and whether the team closes out action items instead of letting them roll over meeting after meeting. Those are lead measures. That realization alone made the book worth reading. Its not because we don't know already how to measure our projects, programs, portfolios, intiatives. Its helps us stop to ask are the measures we are currently tracking getting us to outcomes we want to achieve. It may be a good to re-evaluate.
As I read the book
another question surfaced. What allows people to consistently perform those lead measures?
Imagine an organization identifies exactly the right lead measures. Now ask yourself: do employees actually have the capacity to perform them? Do they have the authority to make decisions? Do they have access to the information they need? Or are they spending most of their day in meetings, responding to emails, navigating approval processes, and absorbing shifting priorities?
If that's the reality, the issue isn't the lead measures. The issue is the system surrounding them.
That's where my thinking began to shift. Many execution conversations focus on people: how do we motivate them, how do we hold them accountable, how do we improve communication. Those conversations matter.
But people don't execute inside a vacuum. They execute inside organizations, and organizations have structures, processes, governance, decision-making authority, technology, information flows, resource constraints, and culture.
Those elements determine whether great execution is even possible in the first place.
Throughout my career, I've watched organizations attempt something incredibly difficult: maintaining day-to-day operations while at the same time transforming the business. They're building the boat while sailing it. Sometimes that's unavoidable. Manufacturers still have to manufacture. Hospitals still have to care for patients. Banks still have to serve customers. The challenge isn't doing both. The challenge is designing the transition. Have we created enough capacity? Aligned the right resources? Simplified governance? Clarified decision-making authority? Have we intentionally designed the organization to support the strategy we've chosen?
As I continue researching execution, I don't think the conversation ends with identifying lead measures. I think another one begins: what organizational system consistently produces those lead measures? That's a different question, and I think it's the one worth sitting with.
One observation I've made throughout my career is that organizations rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. If anything, it's the opposite. There are more good ideas than there is capacity to execute them.
Every executive has another initiative. Every department has another priority. Every team has another project. Eventually everything becomes important, and when everything becomes important, execution gets diluted.
Reading The 4 Disciplines of Execution reminded me that focus is essential, lead measures are essential, and visible scoreboards are essential. I agree with those principles. But they've also pushed me to think one layer deeper.
Execution isn't simply about choosing the right priorities or identifying the right lead measures. It's also about designing organizations capable of consistently acting on those priorities and measures.
As I continue writing and researching Execution Intelligence, that's one of the questions I'm committed to exploring. Not because I think I have all the answers, but because I believe it's a question worth asking.
Before We Close
I'd like to leave you with a simple exercise you can apply this week.
Take a look at your organization's scorecards, dashboards, KPIs, or project status reports, wherever progress gets measured, and ask yourself three questions.
First, what are your lag measures? These are the outcomes you're trying to achieve: revenue, schedule performance, customer satisfaction, quality, project completion, whatever success looks like in your organization. They tell you whether you've been successful. They don't tell you what to do next.
Second, what are your lead measures? What are the daily or weekly actions your team can directly influence that increase the likelihood of achieving those outcomes? Ask yourself: if we stopped performing these actions tomorrow, would our results eventually change? If the answer is yes, you've probably identified an important lead measure.
Finally, what is one action you can take this week to improve that lead measure? Not next quarter, not next year. This week. Maybe it's creating uninterrupted time for focused work. Removing an approval bottleneck. Clarifying ownership. Improving communication between two teams. Automating a repetitive activity. Or simply making your lead measures visible so everyone understands what success looks like.
Start with one action, because execution doesn't improve through awareness alone. It improves through intentional action. The more I study execution, the more convinced I become that organizations don't improve because they measure more. They improve because they identify the few measures that matter most, and build an environment where people can consistently act on them.
So the next time your organization launches a strategic initiative, don't just ask, "What are our lead measures?" Also ask, "Have we designed an organization capable of consistently acting on those measures?" Lead measures drive performance. Well-designed systems make that performance sustainable.
Thank you for joining me for another episode of Project Success Playbook.
