[joshyeager]

Thanks for the detailed reply! I understood your intent, don't worry about the tone.

We're a small enough team that we all understand the business drivers. The main goal of our agile transition is to improve predictability and clarity. Month-wide error bars on a three-month release don't help those goals much.

Right now we're working to shorten our release cycle and learn how to communicate clearly even when it hurts, on the assumption that shining light on the difficulties will help us find and solve the problems as quickly as possible. But it's definitely a painful transition.

One more point: I agree that negotiating scope with a fixed schedule is difficult. We have done that occasionally. But sales and business people are definitely more willing to accept schedule slippage than scope reduction.