Ad hoc Product Development

There are those that say that agile is the way and that the time for conventional project management has passed into the distance, and I would disagree.  Those that complain about how poorly the conventional approach meets the objective, in my experience, often do not practice anything even remotely related to a disciplined conventional approach.  There is a measure of discipline espoused in the doctrine in which you can perhaps expect the outcome to be close to that predicted by the doctrine.  Even agile has a certain measure of discipline, dump the planning session, forget the daily meetings and let pandemonium reign.  What do you think will happen with that form of product development execution?  I have heard executives and managers alike pooh-pooh a disciplined product development approach as by the book electing instead to allow random actions and pandemonium to reign.

Those that complain about how poorly the conventional approach meets the objective, in my experience, often do not practice anything even remotely related to a disciplined conventional approach.  There is a measure of discipline espoused in the doctrine in which you can perhaps expect the outcome to be close to that predicted by the doctrine.  Even agile has a certain measure of discipline, dump the planning session, forget the daily meetings and let pandemonium reign.  What do you think will happen with that form of product development execution?  I have heard executives and managers alike pooh-pooh an approach as by the book as if any approach documented in a book is to be ridiculed and the team move as far from that approach as possible.  Think about that in terms of configuration or requirements management, should we abandon those approaches because these are described in books?  As an example, I am sure my experience of companies wasting millions of dollars on projects due to poor configuration and change management processes during product development is not an anomaly.