At Agile and Development conferences this year some sessions have been looking at how to improve Agile techniques using failed projects as examples. Discussing some of these issues and reading blogs and articles it appears that a significant percentage of Scrum projects have failed and it is not quite the silver bullet many expected it to be.In this weeks video blog I asked some of the leading Scrum experts (Dan Rawsthorne, Alan Shalloway, Sanjiv Augustine and Ken Pugh) what they thought the most common reasons for failing Scrum projects is and what advice they can give to resolve this. In their opinion, it appears management and managing the Product Owner are currently areas to improve upon.I believe that many organizations that practice Agile techniques do not strictly follow Scrum, XP, Crystal or any of the other flavors of Agile directly, but instead adopt a hybrid ‘Agile-esque’ practice using parts of these methodologies that they feel work best for their projects. This was reiterated at Bob Martin’s keynote at Agile 2008 where he also stated that ‘Agile’ will be the term used as a practice rather than the umbrella for the individual practices such as Scrum, XP etc. Will this see an increase in Project success? Only time will tell.One opposing theory is; teams will adopt whatever practices they can implement easily and quickly to comply with senior management edicts so they can claim their organizations are ‘Agile’ (whatever that means to them?!?). The reality is, underneath they will really be working in a Waterfall manner with little change to project success.Such proponents of this theory will state that only by following the practices strictly, can you achieve project success repeatedly (as demonstrated by Menlo Innovations).