I wish that process consulting was making me a millionaire. That aside, I think in one of Jerry Weinberg's books he says something along the lines of "things a

I wish that process consulting was making me a millionaire. That aside, I think in one of Jerry Weinberg's books he says something along the lines of "things are they way they are because they got that way." In other words, in most cases processes in big shops have evolved in response to past circumstances. It's kind of like contracts - they're long and complicated, but each clause reflects a lesson that someone learned in the past (the hard way). I like the idea of regular, frequent delivery, but my experience has been that for a lot of IT shops that is not a practical approach, either because of user or management expectations. And in a few, rare cases it may be because of IT's technical capability. More often the heavyweight process has evolved because of issues that have occurred in the past (unplanned outages, etc.), or because of management's desire for "predictability" in their delivery process.