I just finished Craig Larman’s  book on Agile Development and began reading Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and am noting similarities in the way he describes High Reliability Organizations (HRO) and agile methods. One of the challenges we have in software development is to find a workable management style for the development teams. My experience is that, with rare exceptions, BP and IT managers still think of software development as 2167a waterfall, and they are really not that interested in becoming part of the development team. When they do become part of the team, they tend to overreact on the side of organizational inclusiveness, and you end up with more SMEs than you need, and then only for the initial phases of the development effort. (And of course, like any bureaucracy, fail to heed the observation that “availability is not a skill.”)