This somewhat mirrors my own experience with trying to practice Scrum: The spot where agile practices fail is invariably in management misunderstanding how it's

This somewhat mirrors my own experience with trying to practice Scrum: The spot where agile practices fail is invariably in management misunderstanding how it's supposed to work. Techies may get lost in bikeshedding every single user story, but it's management who hires Uncle Bob to come deliver a 1-week mandatory all hands training course and then doesn't bother to show up for it. If they had, or if hey had bothered to read a book or something, then they would probably have seen that nice chart that's invariably somewhere close to slide (or page) 4 that lists all the things that $agile_process is and is not good for, accompanied by warnings about the need to be adaptable. It's part of why I'm uncomfortable with name brand agile practices, because they make it way too easy for folks to interpret the guidelines as rules, or to interpret a useful tool as a silver bullet. For a while it bothered me so much that I was inclined to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don't like to think that way anymore, though. Incompetent leadership will cause a team to be dysfunctional regardless of how it's organized. Blaming X or Y organizational technique for your boss's bad behavior is a gross misunderstanding of the situation.