Leon, while I agree with your approach of value vs scope, I don’t agree with some of the misconceptions you have about project management.

First of all, you are mixing two things, decision making and execution on those decisions. Let’s take SCRUM you mentioned in your tags. That’s a project in miniature. The project manager in your example is part of your development team. Business is your product owner. Now, is it a part of the responsibility of the development team to decide what will contribute the most value to a solution they are making? Do they have all the necessary knowledge and expertise to make such a call? Especially if it is the first sprint? Normally — no. The product owner is the person who knows that and all that development team can do — help him to understand what is achievable. Would we know that actual value was delivered before the end of a sprint? Unlikely. Is canceling a sprint a good thing? Really? Why don’t we do it more often then? Should we change our goal in the middle of the sprint and try to deliver something else? This would definitely make product owner happy. If we deliver significantly less than we have taken for a sprint — can you call this a “successful” sprint?

Secondly, you see “going out of budget” as something completely normal “if it creates better returns”. Now, the thing is — returns are usually not known at the moment of expenditure. Let’s say you are building a house to live in (construction is the industry where project management is used most widely). Now, you’ve taken a loan and financed this project. At some stage in the middle, you are being told that your project will go 5 times over budget. Would you appreciate this as a customer? You’ll go bust way before you will be able to reap any benefits from your project. And even in the business settings, budgets are not unlimited.

Next time you talk to your software developers, tell them that programming is a completely worthless discipline because it can’t ensure that the code created is of value to the business.