See, this is the thing: on the one hand it's supposed to be all about committing to a specific direction ahead of time and not letting yourself be pulled somewhere else -- on the other hand it's supposed to be all about developers being empowered to work on what's most important at the moment (I mean it's right there built into the name!) Those seem in direct conflict.

We don't have organizational pressure pulling us in different directions -- we have reality pulling us in different directions. I'm not going to tell a customer "no, you can't have that bug fix or that new feature yet, we have a Methodology to follow."

> "Project Managers" don't exist in Scrum.

Right. Just project owners, product owners, scrum masters....

> In your case it seems like you've had something foisted on you by external people talking out of their rear.

I think you're onto something there. (They keep changing their minds, too: one week it's fibonacci sizing, next week it's T-shirt sizes. One week it's scrums, next week it's kanban. The actual working process seems to stay the same, only the jargon shifts around.)