Yeah, sometimes. It's challenging. When I've been successful, it's usually been a mixture of ingredients: a majority of capable team members who want to succeed; some level of management support for the changes you need to make; introducing (or improving) build and test automation; and planning and tracking work iteratively, chunking work into small end-to-end slices whenever possible. I know "agile" methods often get a bad rap (and often rightly so), but if you have a project in trouble, you need to be able to understand how much work you have left, and how you're progressing towards getting that work done.