What do you actually track vs what you pretend to track?

Something I’ve been thinking about lately… On paper, it always looks like we’re tracking everything. Progress, deadlines, dependencies, risks, capacity, all neatly updated in the system. But if I’m being honest, there’s a gap between what we say we track and what actually holds up in real life.

There are things that look good in reports but don’t really mean much once you start digging into them. And then there are things that actually matter but are harder to capture properly, so they end up living in conversations instead of the system.

Like, we technically track progress but how accurate is that really? We track deadlines but how often are they still based on assumptions that changed two weeks ago? We track dependencies but a lot of coordination still happens outside the tool anyway. It kind of feels like part of the system is real and part of it is just there because it’s expected to be there.

Not even in a bad way, just… there’s a limit to how much of actual work translates cleanly into structured data. What’s something your team officially tracks but you don’t fully trust?