> I love the analogy of a burger joint and ordering a burger with fries I would like to argue that the burger joint is actually very agile. The person taking t

> I love the analogy of a burger joint and ordering a burger with fries I would like to argue that the burger joint is actually very agile. The person taking the order isn't the project manager. He just has the role of placing the order on the kanban board. From hereon the rest of the people all take their self-managed roles to fulfill the order. You can point out such agile (lean) processes throughout the entire delivery chain. > Agile was supposed to help on this, but it hasn’t. My experience has been exactly the opposite. Those companies that managed to achieve a true agile process (or achieved an agile bubble inside a structured organization) were making the best progress. What I do see, however, is many companies misinterpreting agile. Especially Scrum. They see Scrum as a method for ticking off the to-do list provided by the product owner. I've seen project managers posing as scrum masters and project managers posing as product owners. It's still top-down management and the team is expected to follow orders. They don't seem to understand the principles of the sprint goal or how it's actually the development team that ought to own the sprint backlog. They never really did scrum. > I mean, a true agile contract can’t specify requirements, cost and time at once This is indeed a challenge. You can - at most - sell sprints. With agile you say: "You have the dev team for this amount of time". It's an uncertainty for the client. But in my experience this has always led to the most bang for the buck. I'm surprised you haven't experienced these results? > Which unfortunately means that you need to promote a few developers into unhappiness This perhaps is an argument in favor of agile. Those project managers indeed need to know how to make those damn burgers. Then why not just make them your lead dev (chef-cook)?