I saw the thread about some Tech Leads being Project Managers but my direct manager is also my SCRUM master. This sounds messed up to me but maybe it's common?
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We have people Managers in scrum master roles at our site too! They have LR'd a few scrum masters and a number have also left of their own accord after getting stagnated at current grade levels with little chance of promotion. One friend of mine who directed two scrum teams finally left as there was no money to match an offer he got from HP for the same role. He was a grade 6! Yet there was plenty of money to promote someone in his management chain to Director a short time later.
Agile is being used by the business at Cisco to push through crap at break-neck speeds. If there are strong Product Owners that are not lackies of the business, it could work. This is not what we have.
If you are spending 30 mins a day in a scrum meeting, that's the first problem. It should be 15 mins max.
And you don't need a technical scrum master, and a project manager is a perfect fit (if they aren't doing project management side role). The scrum master just guides the team through the process....he/she doesn't weigh on technical matters: that's for the dev team to self manage what they can accomplish and who will do it.
The key problem at Cisco is that they have cut alot of the good project managers (ie paid too much), and now they don't have anyone remotely eligible for the scrum roles. Thus the manager or tech lead gets it. This happens every time Cisco cuts PMs......and in 6-12 months they realize the mistake and start hiring PMs again....and the cycle repeats over and over. No one at Cisco has a consistent view or control.
As a TL I volunteered to be a SM. I was idealistic, had high hopes. It soon turned into me being the lackey for the managers. No thanks.
Agile is a mess at this company.
... turns stand-ups into status reports where everyone has to look good for the manager, instead of honestly report issues.
It doesn't take having the manager as the scrum master to make that happen. My team had to put a positive spin on everything. If you were the person who was constantly saying that this or that wasn't getting done, or that you were not making progress on something, you were in the hot seat. Or, if you were the one working on the "run-the-business" tasks instead of the "grow-the-business" tasks, you had to make things look better so that you were not on the bottom of the performance rating and the top of the headcount reduction list.
Forget the technical issues - it's really, really bad to have the manager be Scrum Master - that turns stand-ups into status reports where everyone has to look good for the manager, instead of honestly report issues.
@KFKK my people manager/scrum master is the opposite of technical. In fact, I'm not even sure they know what we are trying to do. We have scrum Product Owners who are usually Tech Leads and they go to all the meetings as well as the scrum master, so that's double the wastage you identified in your post. I guess that's 'agile'
I guess it depends on the team. Is your people manager also technical?
I've had technical people who were terrible people managers as a manager. I've had people managers who started their careers on the technical track and could understand technical issues at high levels. I've had people managers who had zero technical skills. Cisco is not unique in having both good and bad managers.
For a team that does technical work, you want a people manager who has a good understanding of the technology just so they can make good leadership decisions. If you can afford the staffing, having a technical lead to be the scrum master and letting the people manager do just that, manage people, then you have the potential for a great team. Too many times, the technical lead gets bogged down with running sprints, being the scrum master, and having to attend manager meeting to explain why we need additional time or resources to accomplish x, y or z means that they are too busy to solve the problems that a technical lead should be dealing with and they get burned out or become unhappy with doing so much drudge work and not fun work.
If you have a non-technical person, people manager or even a project manager, as your scrum master, then you have a recipe for disaster. Hopefully they have a strong technical lead they can lean on for an understanding how how long various tasks or features will take so that the sprints are realistic and achievable. Otherwise, everyone is unhappy, or is stressed out from overwork.
I've always hated when teams use "agile" or scrum processes when doing anything other than product development. I've never worked on a team that did it right. When I worked on agile teams, I spent more time in meetings discussing the status of stuff than I did working on stuff. And I had to sit through meetings talking about stuff that I wasn't involved in that could have been better used working. What's the point of spending 30 min to an hour talking about stuff when I only get 2-10 min of talking about my stuff? That's 28-50 min of productivity gone from my day.