Recently when I was going through a roles and responsibilities document, I was asked the difference between “tracking” and “managing”. This, because I had differentiated between “tracking of risks” and “management of risks”. To my audience they were one and the same thing.
This question is very typical and to me, it is a symptom of why project management* is starting to get confused with project administration. In our obsession to quantify and measure we have turned project management into a checklist activity. It appears to be an endless list of lists! People have become so busy trying to draw up lists and tick-boxing them that they seem to have lost the original objective:
Projects are about delivering REAL outcomes to REAL people!!!
Before turning project management into a checklist, a PM needs to understand the content and the stakeholders. A good PM structures the project delivery according to needs of the content and stakeholders. By all means go and draw up your checklists now … but please ensure that each checklist is moving the project forward towards the final outcome. Unfortunately, we seem to start with a pre-determined list trying to fit delivery into our list of lists and then wonder what went wrong!
So what is the difference between managing and tracking?
Tracking relates to past and present. One tracks activity that has happened to assess quality of what has happened. It is more like a check “Done? Yes? Move on …” / “Not Done? Fix before moving on …”. Data collected via tracking forms input into management. Unfortunately, quite often meaningless data is collected and never used. Tracking should be targeted and focussed, and outputs of tracking MUST be fed back into the management process.
Management is related to the future. It means looking into the future and being able to predict the road blocks and pitfalls – putting plans in place to ensure when the team reaches these points they are well prepared. Project Management is about knowing the overall path that the team will traverse and ensuring they are equipped with the tools to carve a road along the determined path – it is about the intangibles. If everything was tangible and predictable (such that it can be itemised in a pre-determined list), then there would be no need for project managers … just coordinators or administrators would be sufficient.
Management and tracking go hand in hand, as long as tracking is sensible – not project data collection for the sake of collection!
* For the purpose of this article, I use Project Management and Program Management interchangeably. The difference is in the scale – basic rules remain the same.
by Ruchi Motial-Suri
Director/Consulting- Karigar Australia
