From my limited experience, scrum can work (defining 'work' as 'make people more productive'), and even in the classic situations that give rise to the flaccid

From my limited experience, scrum can work (defining 'work' as 'make people more productive'), and even in the classic situations that give rise to the flaccid variety (I work for a blue-chip media corporation which is just in the last couple of years trying to build a modern engineering culture basically from scratch, and it happens to work). A pretty important point for making scrum work, however, is aggressive timeboxing of everything. If you don't want retros to become a 4 hour developer-kvetch about somebody else's team, start by ruthlessly clipping it to 45 minutes. I understand that this is not always an option in malfunctioning corporate environments; but Kanban/XP/programming motherfkerism wouldn't fly either in those situations.