My company is finally moving (crawling) towards Extreme Programming. One of the really nice things about XP is that it avoids the problem you describe. Whenever business people make technical decisions, we technical types tend to writhe in agony ("What do you mean I have to use Oracle and Java? I just wrote a 3-line Perl script that does the same thing.").

However, it goes both ways. The business types get upset when the tech people try to tell them what to do. I worked on one project where the tech staff voted unanimously to use product X, but management picked product Y. The tech people were mad as hornets, but we had a deadline mandated by federal law and the far superior product X would take so long to setup and train users that we were guaranteed to miss the deadline.

XP is nice because the business decisions and the technical decisions are separated. If I'm handed a story card that says every button on a form must be hot pink and moo when a user clicks on it, I just have to trust that the customer knows what he/she is doing. In turn, they have to trust that I know what I am doing. It's a very nice way to go about things.

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.