[AnimalMuppet]

Let's step away from the contracting scenario for a minute. Let's say it's purely in-house, and the team is committed to agile. That's great... until you run into a layer of management that doesn't understand agile. They still want the old waterfall-style progress reports, and they still make decisions based on them - decisions that can kill your project. This can force you to suddenly be less agile, or to present an interface to those outside your team as if you were not agile.

Back to contracting. If you're a contractor, even if the team you're working with is fully on board with being agile, you can still get burned by higher layers of their organization.