I've come to understand that the most important part of any software project is the Critical Twenty, the first 20% of the project's timeline where developers' need to do things like gain a deep understanding from reading documentation and lay down the infrastructure and architecture and foundation necessary to support features above.

On a 10 month project, this translates to reading docs and putting down foundation stuff, and delivering no features, for the first two months.

Attempts to abrogate The Critical Twenty are what causes the majority of problems later on in most software projects.