I've worked on many teams, medium size (20+ developers) and smaller, and for the most part the project lead managed the project in terms of projections, collecting and reporting tasks and status reports, etc. In no case was that the only thing they did, and even in smaller teams it was easy to see that sometimes the project management suffered.
Whether that was due to poor PM skills, or due to lack of time is less clear.
What are a few key indicators that will help a team understand when to
- Make project management a specific assigned task to a particular person (who may or may not be working on other aspects of this project)
- Make project management the only task that person works on (full time)
- Pull in a project management professional (ie, use someone who is trained specifically for this task, rather than someone whose primary skills lie elsewhere)
While it may be easy to focus on problems during the project that indicate more effort is needed, it would be better if we had indicators that could be used at the outset to determine the priority and resources dedicated to project management so that such issues are less likely to occur.