I agree with the theory. The practice, on the other hand, is a lot harder to implement.

"Can you slap me together a quick prototype? I need to see data in this for it to make sense to me if it's right"... said prototype heads to production a week later.

"Hey, I need a quick page that'll let me access customer data in this way. No, don't worry, it's not a big deal..."... Said page suddenly becomes the core of the new CRM system... and you're never given a chance to redesign around the 4 minute data pull it takes per page.

"How do I know if the report looks right? We don't do widgets and gaskets, I need real numbers." Said report gets slapped together with faked data. "Still, this isn't right, look, the numbers don't..." Fine, so you build the entire damned thing. "Oh, no, we don't need it anymore... it's not blue in background now, it's green. Cancel the entire report request, thanks, we built it in Excel." *blinks*

A shop cannot be hyper-agile and flexible and run under the 'sign every blessed thing' conditions. Larger projects I agree should go through this process... but then the business learns to send down everything in small bites to avoid the necessary paperwork and signoff so they can just get their stuff done without getting stuck in 2 weeks of meetings. They don't want to be there any more than we do.

No, I don't have any 'good' answers to the problem. It's person to person more than tech to issue. Build me any semi-agile system and people will gravitate towards the one where it's not their *** in a sling if it doesn't work. Set everything in stone and 'IT is just impossible to work with!'. Leave it all on the fly and you get a rotting dung-heap. We'll figure it out eventually, I guess.