A Blueprints for Project Success

Agree, but not always right teams are available unfortunately. Looks you prefer Agile projects rather than Waterfall

The less you plan the greater the probability you will be responding to events - its called "fire fighting". Leave the fire fighting to the truly unexpected events (unknown unknowns).

The planning is critical even when you have the ideal team.

Good day Sergio, very good point but not all projects having well defined scope and requirements. So in this case we have to run Agile mindset and Agile project management as this is more trendable and more practical experience. Looks today more customers also prefer work on Agile - Scrum methodology. I think today world Project Management going to be hybrid methodologies to manage projects rather than well-defined scope projects as experience shows not always requirements are clear from initiating phase of projects.

I get concerned when people start to refer to projects as "Agile-" or "Waterfall-" projects. The project should not be defined by the delivery methodology or ideology - the delivery methodology should be defined by the project needs.

No project have well defined scope and requirements does not matter the approach you use. That´s very well defined from long time ago. Take a look to Barry Boehm´s work mainly "Cone of Uncertainty". Sorry but sustain that the use of Agile approach or some framework like Scrum will help to that is to fail in the trap of silver bullet and following what lot of people sell without really understanding about they are talking about. Project objectives or goals are beyond scope/cost/schedule and quality while they are based on it. What I tried to pointed out about well defined objectives is you still can see project objectives like "growth 5% in market share in the current year" which are totally wrong because this is a product objective, not a project objective. The project will help to that by creating the defined product with the required quality in the needed time and budged. So, people can define one or more project related objectives to support the product objectives. That´s what I have to be done.

Please let me comment on your statement. I fully agree. And mainly when things happened like compare Agile (an approach) with Waterfall (a life cycle). Nothing to compare between both. Unfortunately this type of things is jeopardizing the work of lot of people that try to work with Agile, Lean or other approaches seriously.

In my opinion Agile and Lean have been commercialized by organizations promoting themselves above everything else. The Lean Construction Institute's main premise is that "the construction industry is busted" and Lean is the 'no-risk' solution (got that from their web site)..The "Agile Manifesto" came out of a meeting of high-level software developers in 2001. The fact that it is referred to as a "manifesto" should be concerning.

Both of these 'project approaches' have some great ideas which should not be overlooked but that's all they are - ideas and process that may be applicable to specific project needs. But neither replaces smart (traditional definition of the word), risk-driven project management and delivery.