just recently I read this article about Scrum adoption in china,which I think is a valuable reference/evaluation for projects being done by China development teams.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/Agile-adoption-study-china
Compared to the benefit/success story of Srcum in China, I am more interested in the failure examples. I think from David and Fiona's description their failures are both due to Communication problem. Every experienced leader would advocate that "Communication is very important....",but we need to define communication. it's not a regular meeting or formal report in some format/template.There is no BEST template for communication.
Communication is all about convey/receive information. If you think someone is not clear about something and he needs to know that, you keep telling him,if you think you don't understand something and you feel you should know it,then you ask.But many cases are that we don't have a concrete thing to talk or we don't feel we really talked about the key issue.In Chinese,"没说到点子上".
From the aspect of communication , I think the benefit that Scrum can bring about is it greatly increases the volume of information communicated during a project process.
Because with circular sprint,we deliver many versions of product to customers, then we can have much more feedback from them for a long term. Just like when you're talking to someone about a car,there is always more to talk/hear when you really have a car by your side.