Oh don't get me started on middle managers.....oh, too late!
Most IT project managers come from Bachelor of Anything (BA) schools, their simple job is to play with MS-Project, do some simple addition 'n substraction using Excel and spend an inordinate ammount of time on producing Power Point Presentations.....oh dear, etc.
Upper management find it hard to talk to developers, hence they recruit a lacky to do this work for them. The lacky, with his BA, runs around asking the devs for estimates. He then communicates this to upper management, who unfortunately live in their own world of PDAs and executive toilet keys. They in turn do a simple calculation of dev days * dev cost = too much money (it always equals too much money). Having no regard for anything other than the worn out mantra of "reduce costs" they insist the lacky reduce the estimates. And so begins another disaster in the world of software development.
Given that 80% of all IT projects are overspent, over time and fail to meet all requirements you'd think someone might actually one day wake up and smell the coffee.
So the end result is you have a company structured via Taylor Hierarchy with people at the top who want things done, people at the bottom who do things and loads of people in the middle who feck things up.
Of course, some companies are beginning to realise this disaster scenario and have replaced their lackys with tech heads. And these companies tend to fare much better.
The business threat of Open Source to these traditionaly structured companies highlights this very well. Which is quite nice in my oppinion
Remember, the revolution is only a T-Shirt away....mine says "I haven't got Tourettes, yer just a c**t!"