For the case of having a "default" interface to each project, I default to Python Invoke to achieve the same idea. Write a task.py and drop it in the directory, then invoke away.

Make is a powerful tool, but it also has a lot of tribal knowledge, baroque limitations (spaced files, tabs most common) and a dense manual. 99 times out of 100, I just want to drop into a directory and run a few simple canned commands. Invoke usually has a lot less conceptual baggage to get this across, and it's written in a language the team understands with little extra training.

And in the more complicated cases of make... I'm probably going for rely on Autotools or cmake to produce the Makefile for me.