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Professional project management (PMI) embraces critical path, iron triangle, risk management. Iteration was always The Correct Answer™.

Kids today conflate "throw it over the wall" with waterfall.

Agile rejects planning, foresight, vision, end goals. Agile was explicitly concocted to manage upwards, in those organizations unable or unwilling to do proper planning. Unfortunately, the originators wrote down their survival tips, which were then misunderstood by noobs and embraced by profiteers. Just like every other religious text.

Agile is not the victory of iteration over some imagined dark ages of project chaos. The Agile Methodology is to argue about the Agile Methodology. The cult(ural) spread of Agile is no different than any other vacuous self-help omni-fix content-free dogma.




Agile does not reject those things. That’s just a nonsensical statement at best and a straw man at worst.


Nothing in this discussion seems to even mention the most important part of agile: talking to customers often


Absolutely!

That's the genius of the Agile Methodology. Per the Zeroth Law of True Agility [0], we're both utterly correct. With no contradiction.

[0] The Agile Methodology is to argue about the Agile Methodology.


The obvious response is that PMI is a cargo cult. I mean if we're straw-manning everything.


The more interesting question is: Why did Agile beat PMI?

Because project management is not a critical success factor.

Most projects are late, buggy, or outright failures.

One response was to improve project management. That worked okay. But like with most knowledge work, requires some effort.

Another response was to accept the failure rate and simply throw more resources at the problem.

aka Worse is better.


Worse is Better is something else altogether.




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