Some of this is good. Projects, which originally was just teams banding together to create new solutions, have since devolved into certifications, consultancy-hell and stealing focus and means from long-term development. Truth is, most projects tend to become very IT-centric and short-term. Long-term organization-building and investment in your people become actively discouraged. If you need to spend 6-12 months to decide what you want to try to accomplish, all the while trying to avoid failure like the plague, you'll be too late for the party, plus your solutions will likely suck anyways.
However, with the right cross-functional mindset and engagement, projects may work just as well as any agile technique or process. In fact, the problem is often about devolving into becoming slaves to a process, instead of investing into finding the best solutions at all levels. So while many agile approaches may raise amount of work done or even provide better planning and workflows, the root problems remain as long as top management ignore organizational needs, and as long as people work more on "optimizing our processes" aka adding to wasteful paperwork and cutting corners, rather than creating good solutions and customer value.
So it'll be with these new fads. Management will find ways to make them suck too. Alas, while the focus is fresh, it might accomplish 5-10% production increase. Most traditional companies will fail to reap much beyond this because of failure to remedy perverse incentives. Only those leaders managing to reinvent their companies (while avoiding destructive reorgs) will see much more benefits, and then their success will not be from blindly following a formula, but by filling real needs, first internally and then externally.
