[the_af]

I agree with the skepticism of capital-A agile, but I have to wonder about that first example of the failed project.

Would using any other method have helped? It seems leadership/management was simply oblivious to any problems or feedback by the team members. The team surfaced problems and mentioned that "nothing went well" and "everything went wrong" and nobody did anything about it.

I must ask, which project management style would have worked in this scenario where clearly nobody was listening?

[AnimalMuppet]

Answer: None of them. Because no matter what project management style you pick, the same managers would be running it. They would still be not listening to anything, still be not fixing anything, still be watching it go off the cliff without any intervention.

In fact, I assert that a good methodology can't save bad managers.

But bad managers sense that they're floundering, so they reach for the panacea du jour, hoping that it will magically rescue them. It won't. It might work in the hands of competent managers, especially if it's genuinely appropriate for the project, but in the hands of bad managers, all you get is disaster no matter what the methodology is.