Excerpted from The Truth about Getting Your Point Across…and Nothing But the Truth

Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, was suspended for a year from Mount Holyoke College for lying about serving in the Vietnam War.

I recently keynoted at a Project Management Symposium.  During the symposium several executives provided perspective on the importance of Project Management to the organization.  One of the executives centered his discussion around people having vision.  I can imagine the reaction of some of the people in the room.   "Yeah, right.  I've got projects with impossible deadlines, my customer is breathing down my neck because she is not getting what she wants, my project team isn't dedicating enough time on my project, and budget cuts mean I have to figure out how to get more done with less.  You want me to have vision?   I can barely get things done as it is!"

I feel your pain, colleagues.  But I also agree with the exec.

 A couple of years back I was engaged on a project to help recover an agile project run amok.  The project was one of the first in the organization to use an agile development methodology and consisted of eight four-week sprints with six capability development teams.  The project manager was a very theoretical scrum master who was more concerned with having an agile "design win" than he was with ensuring the business sponsor was satisfied with the project result.  After about the third sprint there were significant issues with capabilities not working together, interfaces with external systems breaking, and problems with meeting sprint dates for committed capabilities.  To save the project, we had to take a number of steps that violated the purist agile model but were necessary if we were going to keep moving forward on the project.  Our implementation looked like a mishmash of agile and waterfall.  It wasn't pretty, but we eventually got the project done.