I recently inherited a project that was "late". The team and project were 6 months into execution, and had nothing to show for it. The status on my Day 1 was "estimates were missed -- now what?"

On appearances, everything should have been just fine. The SWEs and product leader were running two-week sprints, with all the ceremonies scheduled on all calendars (well, everything except the end-of-sprint demo.) Every two weeks, a status powerpoint slide deck came from the product leader espousing all the fantastic capabilities that were recently implemented by the team.

I needed to understand what was going on. I chose to observe everything for two sprints (and not interrupt how everyone worked) while I focused on establishing a clear and comprehensive view of The Project.

What I discovered:

- An ambiguous and unclear definition of the project. Key facts, problem statement, overall solution ... did not exist. The product leader could give you some spin of this off the top of his head, which would invariably change from time to time.

- Work stories (we used JIRA) were garbage. I'm an engineer and even I couldn't understand what work was being completed.

- No capacity for the team to build & deploy software in a reasonable manner.

- No agreement or understanding of expectations among stakeholders.

So, what did we do?

1) Defined the project, with stakeholders in agreement.

2) Devised a solution, based on the project definition.

3) Broke down the work necessary to implement and deliver the solution.

4) Determined individual lengths of time to complete the list of work.

5) Reviewed everything, finding areas of risk and potential further problems.

It sounds like BUD (big upfront design) -- but in practice, it was Big Upfront Discovery. We structured work and components to ensure we had plenty of two-way doors (only a few one-way doors, based on requirements from stakeholders.)

And with that, we made our estimate. Another 6 months. The stakeholders did not like the timeline, but agreed "as long as we make that date." We provided weekly status updates, leaving out no details. Our stakeholder meetings went from contentious and confused to understanding and brothers-in-arms. We made the date and we didn't kill the team (morale actually went up.) The stakeholders loved the resulting solution.

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No magic here, just a focus on attention to details and honest assessment.