A team that has skilled individuals exercising judgement and thinking critically about tools (for project management as for everything else) will alway outperform one that’s subordinate to a process.

That doesn't negate snarf21's point; a good process with buy-in is of course better than a bad process with buy-in.

While I wouldn't be so absolute ("will always") I think you have a great point.

I'll add it to my quote file, file under quotes by snarf21 :-)

I'm worried that a file of quotes by me could provide such value that they need persisted. :D

Absolutely. I let the pms do their thing and follow the rules. Every organization I've worked with is thrilled when developers get buy in, but guess what your process is still pretty crappy and we just want to make you feel good about it.

Positive criticism always falls on deaf ears - "why not just give it a chance" blah blah.

Our agile process has complete buy in from developers.

Yet the product is markedly inferior to the same product we created with fewer developers in a shorter period of time, while also creating the backend services, right before we created this product, when we were not following ‘agile’.

Because the current management approved Agile is just a bunch of rules that are enforced upon us. The previous process was basically an ad god process we had built up using best practices, adapted based on our own experiences with the unique needs of our team. In a sense, we were far more agile when we were not doing Agile.

It's hard to imagine, that a bad process has complete buy-in.

"That's how we always did it"

Basically the way any larger company works.

I meant "bad" as in perception. A lot of people think waterfall is "bad".