Technology

No thanks. It's way more fun to be part of the decision process. If a manager can anticipate all of the requirements and quirks of the project before it even starts, it's probably going to be a really boring, vanilla project at which point it's probably just better to but the software.ä somewhere else.

Creating something new is an art in itself. Why would you not want to be a part of that?

Also: Isn't it cheating to compare the two approaches when one of them is defined as having all the planning "outside" of the project scope? I would bet that the statistics in this report disregard ll those projects that died in the planning phase, leaving only the almost completed, easy project to succeed at a high rate.

It would be interesting to also compare the time/resources spent before each project died. My hunch is that for failed agile project, less total investment has been made before killing it off, as compared to front loading all of that project planning before the decision is made not to continue.

Complementary to this, I also think that Agile can have a tendency to keep alive projects that should have failed on the planning stage. "We do things not because they are easy, but we thought they would be easy". Underestimating happens for all project but for Agile, there should be a higher tendency to keep going because "we're almost done", forever.