[ownagefool]

I have no doubt you're right.

The thing is, you can have development standards that require small iterations that are immediately deployable and this are immediately tested and deployed, without pulling all the overhead of some PMs interpretation of scrum.

I often find the power is generally with the wrong people and they promote the things that matter to them at the detriment of everything else.

I don't personally believe this is by design, it's just people in $foo management position tend to have the soft skills to make their job easier, when many of the developers often don't. And managers, who tend to control budgets and define departments, tend to give those departments to more managers and there's not a lot of people in the room telling them that a software person should probably run a software team.