Scrum - can it really be useful for short duration gigs?

Scrum as invoked by pioneers like Ken Schwaber is super useful on projects that extend into multiple months with several layers of use cases, controls, and middle and backend tier work. However, with short duration projects, the concept of the sprint and the backlog are difficult to quantify and certainly even more painful to institute in the org without two things - a strong Technical Team Lead (TTL) resource to guide the project team and an easy to use Scrum subset that works for your environment. If you're a UX centric shop or perhaps a pure development shop and you're plugging into a 3rd party's software project, it can get a bit trickier. Despite the burdens, the key is to be sure that you act with the team and moderate these scrums. They should happen at the beginning of the work day, and if you have a global team, you should consider scrumming at the beginning of your local team's day and at the beginning of the remote team's day to assure that progress is being made and that blocks are removed immediately. Quality increases by about 200% if you have the means to supply a TTL to oversee the local team and a TTL to oversee the remote team. Of course, be sure that only one of them acts as the primary and makes all technical decisions for the project. Moderation of the scrum is not the simplest task, and I must say that getting the project team to feel comfortable during these short meetings is vital. Ask them a) what they have done since the last scrum?, b) what do you plan to do between now and the next scrum?, and c) what impedes you from performing your work as effectively as possible? Time limit should be <15 min for this meeting and everyone must be present. Scrumming has side benefits as well - it helps everyone see the estimation process on the execution side, it helps team members realize time spent across various tasks to better produce estimates in the future, and it makes everyone accountable when the PM employs Scrum correctly. Not to say that Scrum has any written rule outside of its core foundation, but it can turn into unnecessary noise for the project team if executed improperly.