[wpietri]

Oh, for sure. I think that's an important component in why it feels good to managers. It's like the "baby driver" toy, the fake steering wheel and console you can give to toddlers. They get to turn the wheel and press the buttons and feel very important.

And I'd add that at the end of the waterfall cycle, metrics often (and incorrectly) show that the workers failed. After all, they said they were 95% done just a bit ago, and now they're suddenly not done. It's very easy to shift blame to them.

As contrast, a lot of the effective Agile techniques don't actually fix problems; they just shorten the feedback loops so problems surface sooner. That's part of why fake Agile won out; managers didn't adopt any of the bits that would make them feel uncomfortable or expose the very real problems with how they run things.