Why long-term plans don't work and how to fix them
The reason we have deadlines and long term plans is financing. Nobody is going to give a development team a blank cheque to produce something they can't describe against no timeline. Furthermore there are often external constraints that impose deadlines and specific long term objectives. A hardware product launch for example. Even within companies, architectural or infrastructural constraints, or business commitments to partners, can add up to essentially the same situation as the agency exception.<p>All the problems the article describes are real, and I found it thought provoking and useful, don't get me wrong.