What is the difference between project lead and project manager?

To evaluate the differences between these two roles lets first define there responsibilities:

Project Lead

• Ultimately responsible for all the teams beneath there chain of command
• Responsible for day to day running and co-ordination of the project managers and synchronization down to contributor teams
• Would likely be given final decision/veto powers of an agile product backlog.
• Responsible up the chain of command to stakeholders and the senior levels of management. For example:
• Finance and budget allocations
• Commercial sensitive information
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Most likely customer facing or responsible to the end customers for his delivery stream.
• Ultimately responsible for meeting expectations at almost any cost they deem acceptable to the business.
• For example delivery on time and within allocated budgets to support the organisations strategic objectives.
• Given more freedom to make the magic happen but ultimately far more responsibility than a project manager if things dont work out.
• Takes high level HR decisions to ensure people being hired into positions deemed important for the value stream are a good fit and capable of delivering what is required without significant disruption.
• Heavily responsible for maximizing return on investment of there allocated delivery stream and evaluated yearly.
• Must make sure the sales teams have what they need from the product development departments to meet the business sales targets and potentially increasing share price.
• Settles disputes among project managers to maximize the benefit to the organisation at large.
• Might be required to solicit feedback and requirements from key people in external organisations.

Project Manager

• Responsible for delivering updates and information from senior management to teams
• Must make sure the product backlog priorities are respected and delivered upon by his teams
• Delivers the teams status up the value chain to the project lead so decisions can be made at the strategic level reliably.
• May measure individual contributions of teams or team members to identify weak links or areas for quick and easy improvements.
• Likely responsible for maintaining an accurate helicopter view of his teams status’s so they can be evaluated by senior personnel at any time for change of strategy.
• Will normally understand the intricate details of a product at a finer level of detail than a project lead.
• Can deal with low level personnel disputes especially when occurring between teams who are meant to be collaborating for the organisations benefit.
• Often responsible for ensuring items required to deliver a project on time are going to be available for the projects success. For example:
• In a manufacturing project there is no point having all the contractors ready to construct things without materials in stock to build with.

Now we can see some slight differences in the roles above. However it is not uncommon for the roles to be interchangeable or merged and split with different variations of above.

It is also common to have a technical or team project lead who actually sits at the bottom of all of these and is just responsible for a smaller set of above but reports up to a project manager.

Ultimately it will come down to how each organisation chooses to be structured so tread with caution when evaluating someone by job title as it may be worth exploring a little deeper to find out there true responsibilities.

Hopefully it helps

Good Luck

Oliver Dolan

You can find more about me here : www.oliverdolan.com