Mike Cohn has a good post titled Seven Deadly Sins of Project Management. Using the notion of the Seven Deadly Sins, Mike raises interesting points around project management. Like many in the agile community, Mike suggesting replacing BAD project management practices with agile project management practices before examining why good project management practices are not be applied in the first place. This is the "red herring" approach to project process improvement.
A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic.
Projects are managed badly, using bad project management methods, so let's use another method.
I'm not saying Mike is doing this on purpose, but it is a popular vehicle for the introduction of agile.
A second fallacy approach is the "false delima,"
The current project management processes are not working for our firm (there is usually strong evidence for this), so let's switch to this agile approach I read about. It's all the rage in a lot of places.
This is not an issue in some domains. But in a domain where "business governance" is in place with the related "IT Governance" - where BTW better development is most needed - simply labeling poor practices as targets for replacement, doesn't get very far down the road to actual improvement.
Here's another view of how to fix the project management problem, before tossing out the baby with the bath water.
