[reticulated]

The single biggest mistake in the example is giving an estimate for the whole project without knowing team velocity. He tried to plan everything up-front and committed to a completion date, strongly setting delivery expectations.

An Agile approach to this walk would have managed the expected target date much better and improved team morale by not overstretching each day ("sprint").

Lots of people think they know (and implement) Agile. I did, until a course I took about a year ago where I learnt skipping seemingly unimportant bits (measuring velocity, sprint retrospectives, etc.) bring the whole process crashing down.

[cs02rm0]

The single biggest mistake in the example is giving an estimate for the whole project without knowing team velocity.

I'm inclined to agree. Often though a client will want an estimate (to a ridiculous accuracy) before agreeing to the work. Unless you churn out web page templates or something equally repetitive it's hard to have that relevant velocity.

I still come up against client managers that don't "believe" in Agile approaches too.

[reticulated]

Oh we still get regular "lively discussions" about exactly what features are going to be in a product with a release date 6 months away. I can completely understand though; it's very difficult to leave a conversation being told "we don't know yet, it's likely to be X & Y (but we're not 100% sure) and possibly Z too".