This is just not accurate. The types of changes thrown in after early requirements gathering are most often coming from product managers and executives, not from customers and not driven by genuine feedback or budget constraints, etc.
“Sticking to the plan” does not mean rigidly enforcing zero changes, but rather means keeping a commitment to the general scope and direction that was mapped out. Compromises should require extraordinary hard evidence before being accepted.
This is really why Agile as a general set of guidelines is so easy to subvert and ends up being a misused tool in most every situation where Agile is deployed (Scrum of otherwise).
Project management guidelines need to start out by specifying a way that quality is strictly disallowed from being subverted by competing interests that lobby for changing the plan.
If a set of software project management guidelines doesn’t start out with an unchallengeable quality-above-all-else mandate that creates policy barriers to the natural entropy of different interests trying to lobby for why their preferred change has to be made, then it’s doomed to just get politically subverted.
Doesn’t matter if it’s Agile, Waterfall, extreme programming, whatever.
“Sticking to the plan” in the sense of setting up preemptive, high-cost barriers to anti-quality modifications to what was agreed is _the_ thing.
“Sticking to the plan” does not mean rigidly enforcing zero changes, but rather means keeping a commitment to the general scope and direction that was mapped out. Compromises should require extraordinary hard evidence before being accepted.
This is really why Agile as a general set of guidelines is so easy to subvert and ends up being a misused tool in most every situation where Agile is deployed (Scrum of otherwise).
Project management guidelines need to start out by specifying a way that quality is strictly disallowed from being subverted by competing interests that lobby for changing the plan.
If a set of software project management guidelines doesn’t start out with an unchallengeable quality-above-all-else mandate that creates policy barriers to the natural entropy of different interests trying to lobby for why their preferred change has to be made, then it’s doomed to just get politically subverted.
Doesn’t matter if it’s Agile, Waterfall, extreme programming, whatever.
“Sticking to the plan” in the sense of setting up preemptive, high-cost barriers to anti-quality modifications to what was agreed is _the_ thing.