This post gets to the heart of my issues with Agile.
Agile’s biggest weakness is that they minimize forecasting. Most companies today, when they commit to a million dollar project, want to know what they get for their money. They want to know when they get it too. And they want to know before they sign the check. The less planning you do at the beginning of a project, the less you know about the end of the project. This is hard for non-Agile companies (or executives) to swallow. By minimizing the upfront planning, Agile teams minimize their ability to forecast the pending results.
I think it requires a mindset change not only for the developer/architect, but also the PM. And I’m not sure that many PM’s are ready to make this mindset change. It takes a leap of faith on their part, and PM’s are notoriously non-faithful. In addition, I don’t think that PM’s have the necessary tools to plan/schedule an Agile project as well as they’d like. I think that all of these issues are surmountable in time, but buy-in on Agile is going to be slow until that has happened.