[ryandrake]

This is a great, experienced reply. All reasonable companies operate somewhere between the extremes: Tracking a project minute-by-minute is extreme. "Kicking off a project one day, and then returning once on the due date to make sure it is done" is an extreme, too. What's an appropriate amount of periodic tracking is a negotiation among all the stakeholders, many of whom need to plan their own work: leadership/execs, marketing, sales, r&d, and many more. Some companies arrived at "weekly tracking" as a happy median, others have longer or shorter periods.

So we've hopefully established that all projects need at least some kind of periodic tracking. So then, how do we do it? As a project manager myself, my preference is to have some kind of automated metric/metrics that I can pull myself and not have to bother engineers directly about. "Ticket count" might not be a good one, but the team should, together, find that good one. My management expects progress updates in some other format (often E-mail or silly slide decks), and I'd love to automate these, too. But, if we can't automate status updates, then I'm not going to just not get them--I'm going to do it the annoying way, by checking in and watching tickets and looking at git logs and manually "pinging" for information. Yuck!

GP's "Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem." quip is only partially true. No, it's not strictly their job to write your project manager's reports for them, but it's also not appropriate to block them. As a team lead, part of their job is to partner with others, and sorry, but that includes the folks watching the clock and looking out for slippage and risks.

[neutronicus]

Yes, and one of the most pressing reasons to track a project is figuring out whether you need to move the due date.

I work at a product company, and "whether the project is complete by the due date" is not the end-all, be-all, for us. If the project is done, eventually, and good, our customers get value! We do, though, need to do things like market the new feature, produce training materials for it, etc, and these efforts need to be synchronized with the the feature actually getting done.

Assessing team performance is honestly not the main goal here! It's coordinating with everyone else in the company who can't act until the project is complete.