Don't Deliver To Promises

The other day I read a great article on building trust one iteration at a time. Considering I'm operating as Scrum Master for the development team in a large waterfall project, something that stood out to me in this article was a comparison of Waterfall to Agile.

In a waterfall delivery, all progress reports are proxies. You’re reporting on intangibles–designs, test cases, or code that isn’t fully integrated or tested. This is all reporting on faith, because it is not verified by working software.

Just this morning this was proven true. A waterfall PM was tracking the progress of some work with a BA who  said "I'm waiting on John. He told me that he'd have it ready for me by COB yesterday. In fact he said the same thing last week."

I had a quiet chuckle to myself.