Strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects.
The more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.
First we need to select projects where precise control won’t matter so much. Then we need to reduce our expectations for exactly how much we’re going to be able to control them, no matter how assiduously we apply ourselves to control.
Consistency and predictability are still desirable, but they haven’t ever been the most important things. The more important goal is transformation.
You say to your team leads, for example, “I have a finish date in mind, and I’m not even going to share it with you. When I come in one day and tell you the project will end in one week, you have to be ready to package up and deliver what you’ve got as the final product.”
Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone by Tom DeMarco.