IT Project Management - life on the front line

OK, I know how most of the Agile community feels about Project Managers: Process over People Meetings Documentation Urrgh... But however you name the role (Agile Delivery, Scrum Master, Project Manager) and whoever does it  - someone needs to help the team to: Plan Track Deliver Communicate Being a group of incredibly talented engineers does not give a team the right to ignore 3.5 of these. All too often, engineers want to dive in to designing and building great software, but see planning as a hassle, tracking as a waste of time (or an abuse of their rights), communication as an alien concept and delivery (the fun bit) as something that will be done when it's done. It may be popular to talk about being a 'self-organising team' and railing against any form of 'order' being imposed.  But why is that order being imposed?  Maybe it's to deal with the chaos that your s-o-t has failed to deal with so far. As organisations scale and the senior leadership gets further a