My wife has decided to take a career break during the early years of our children. She has decided to run our family's Portfolio Office - she scrutinises our different family projects and monitors family expenditure amongst other things.
There are a number of projects that are run by project managers on our family's behalf (e.g. my father-in-law supervised the replacement of our hedge with fencing) and with our money. Despite empowering each project to develop their own solution (perhaps using an iterative and incremental Agile approach or an alternative method), my wife still expects the project manager of each one of them to report on how much they are spending because she wants to know we can continue to afford the investment from available household funds. As you would expect, she does not expect to hear that a project will not report their progress to her - whether run in an Agile or any other fashion.
Yet some of my clients working in Portfolio or Programme Offices are telling me that Agile project teams are telling them exactly this: we do not need to report our progress to you. These teams seem to genuinely believe that use of Agile empowers them to work as they like to deliver their project objectives and that this excuses them from extra-project control.
I am sure that there are many reasons for this perception, such as poor local project understanding of Agile, poor senior management leadership, a lack of a credible status of the Portfolio/Programme Office, etc. Yet the question remains, how does the organisation know if it is spending within its means to get a decent set of benefits if it allows Agile to be used as an excuse for not regularly reporting progress?