[cchooper]

On the issue of a central leader figure, I have seen projects fail precisely because someone was staking a career on it. In that scenario, the customers you truly serve are your boss and your boss's boss. Users? Damn them and their expensive 'requirements'. Support? Someone else's problem. Maintainability? How is that going to get me promoted? All of those things cost time and money, and therefore are risks to be avoided. Better to spend your time burying bad news and selling your failure as 'success' to those who really matter.

All of the self-managing teams I've ever worked on have been much more user-focused and success-oriented (in the true sense) than any project where someone was afraid of losing their head. Self-managing teams just seem to be immune to certain kinds of office politics.

[weland]

This has been my experience as well. That's why I mentioned malformed meritocracy: when you lead a technical project based on non-technical values, projects have a higher chance of failing precisely on the technical side. Which, despite the wet dreams MBAs were brainwashed into believing, is usually a single point of failure, unless you're a company like Oracle, whose licensing practices and negotiation gap allow them to shove any piece of crap along with their DBMS (which is otherwise worth its money).

Keeping good programmers without rewarding technical merit (while, worse, holding non-technical values in a disproportionally high esteem) is, in my experience, next to impossible. It quickly leads to a depletion of valuable team resources. This doesn't necessarily mean poor economic performance -- you can still achieve that through non-technical means, from aggressive licensing to patent trolling. But at that point, what PM methodology you use for your cargo cult software development process isn't really relevant anymore.

In my experience, most of the projects that were led by primarily ladder-ambitious people have been utter failures if taken at their overal impact. Many of them have actually reached their economic goals, but alienated exceptional developers, blocked promotion for more value-oriented professionals and had outrageous maintenance costs. Good if you look only at a handful of trees, bad if you look at the forest.