[brayhite]

To your own point, the reports serve little value aside from a fabricated narrative that some companies like to build feel-goods around.

Discuss the complexities and needs. Break the work into small chunks. Define what progress means. Set expectations for making progress. Regularly and honestly review why you/the team are or aren’t meeting expectations. Rinse and repeat.

Perhaps this is over simplifying it, but these are the tried-and-true high notes in my experience. If at any point one of those steps isn’t feasible, then it’s a larger issue that implementation process likely isn’t going to solve, so the “to measure velocity or not” point seems moot.