Mitch Kapor’s posted a sketch of the Chandler team’s working practices on his site. It’s worth a look for what he says about the management process, and for the documents he’s chosen to point to on the project Wiki. Mitch uses milestone to mean a fixed, biweekly reporting date rather than a subproject completion marker. One lesson: Even without marketing (or political) pressure, the development team has to find a way to balance passing time with the imperative to ship a useful product.
An interesting essay.
Edit 3/20/2011: Chandler’s become a famously messy software project, with a famous book documenting its difficulties. They’re still working on it.