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Never Ending Story: "I was on the phone with a customer today. A junior executive in a large household name company. Just as we were running out of time, he commented that every agile project he'd seen had suffered from a fundamental problem - it had never ended. It had just run and run and run. I didn't have time to really quiz him on this statement and it took me a while to realize what was wrong. Conformance to plan, big planning up-front, deterministic rather than adaptive project management provides a nice clean governance story! How? First some background. Our market research tells us that governance in the industry is pretty poor. A good governance definition involves a means to allocate and re-allocate resources effectively. Readers of my book and other work will know that I define good governance as a means to optimize the return on investors funds (or tax payers dollars). Hence, there is a big gap between where I'd like to see us get and where we are now. So, back to that agile issue. You can ship. And ship. And ship it again. Just relentless release after release. Every iteration more and more functionality. More and more value. Release! Value delivery. Customer satisfaction. Release again. More value! More satisfaction! Release with relentless monotony that you can set your calendar by it. But you know what? It doesn't provide a good governance story (bas"