I’ve seen teams do 2 weeks of detailed project planning and estimating where the entire project could have been done in 2 weeks by a good team if they just set their nose to grindstone and did the work.

It’s unbelievable how useless some of these planning and estimating sessions are.

Dealing with that right now. I have multiple PMs and directors involved in requesting another team to literally do five minutes of work because we didn't insist they put it in the current iteration and they put it several iterations away.

In a lot of places that was the real waterfall method, and also how waterfall earned its illustrious reputation.

Waterfail FTW

I'm now curious. So for how long did it actually take?

Probably got cancelled after 2 months after they realized it was going to take 6 more months.

Not sure, my contract ended a year later.