Generally, there are two types of people in the world: one who follow processes and methodologies as written in books, and the other who enjoy breaking rules and doing things differently. The latter can also be split into two categories: those with good intentions and those with bad intentions. The first category produces innovation and the second category produces criminal behaviour. Society has all these kinds of people. In a healthy society, a majority of people follow processes, some have honourable intentions in breaking rules and only a very few have criminal intentions.

This is evident in software project delivery as well. Let's see how it happens there. Almost all projects select a project delivery methodology (there are many to choose from). There will be a set of people in the project who will understand the intent of the methodology and try to follow it while performing their assigned tasks. There will be another set of people who will have the maturity to understand that certain portions of the project delivery can be better accomplished by slightly tweaking the methodology steps and they will propose this to their colleagues. There will also be a few people who, for less honest reasons, will argue against the methodology steps or suggestions for change. They might propose something that will make their task easier, even if it becomes difficult for the majority of the team to accommodate their proposal. They will take excuses of someone's failure and justify delays from their side. They will create an opaque boundary around their work so that the transparency in the project progress is hindered.

While there may be a majority of people falling under type one (process followers), there are significant number of people falling under the second type, category one (rule breakers with good intentions) and category two (rule breakers with bad or selfish intentions). A fine balance between all these types of people needs to be maintained by the project management. That is why success and failure of a project today is largely in the hands of the project manager, even if the team is highly skilled and experienced.

Depending only on the project management to drive a project is not the best solution. The industry is keen to solve this issue at a strategic level. A major roadblock is that the IT industry is still knowledge-intensive.