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.

Begin rant.

Recently I've noticed a trend which frankly really ticks me off.  My observation is that more and more project managers are becoming hyper risk-averse and demonstrating an unwillingness to accept accountability for the projects they manage.  One tell-tale sign which I've noticed is the usage of "matrixed" organization charts.  In matrixed organization charts, the project team is depicted using different types of team leads shown vertically and horizontally on the organization chart.  With a matrixed organization, team members may have a "solid line" reporting relationship to one manager and a "dotted line" reporting relationship to one or more managers.  Now, I fundamentally don't have a problem with the collaboration aspect that a matrixed organization enables; where I do have a problem is when the matrixed organization makes it difficult to pinpoint who has accountability for the project. 

Excerpted from The Project Management Advisor - 18 Major Project Screw-Ups And How To Cut Them Off At The Pass (Prentice Hall, 2004)

In any event, there is a desire to do something tomorrow that can’t be done acceptably today. Admittedly, some of the most fun projects that I have worked on have been the “omigosh, we need to get this done or else” projects.   I have seen the greatest clarity of purpose on projects where there was a very real and tangible consequence to not completing the project successfully.  One outstanding example of this that affected virtually every business on earth was the Y2K computer scare.  One of my jobs was in ensuring that our mission-critical vendors were adequately prepared for Y2K and that there would not be any business interruption to our company as a result of a vendor’s failure to perform.