Let me sum up my impression of this article:

A. Agile methods are just common sense.

B. My company has no common sense, so it treats the agile methods as some sort of religion, and thereby remains completely dysfunctional.

C. I am in hell and need something to shout at. If I shout at my coworkers I will get fired. But there is a consultant within shouting distance.

D. My life sucks and it's all the fault of the Agile Methodologists!

If anyone ever wonders why management consultants charge all that money: This is it. Would you want to walk into this guy's company and try to give advice? You'd have to be awfully well paid!

The author is on the path to enlightenment, but he is not yet there. He's figured out that the capital-M Methodology is primarily designed for broken companies. [1] He's well on his way to figuring out that he's working in a broken company himself, which is why there are so many people employing Methodology there. What he hasn't figured out is that you can't fix a broken company by walking up to people and telling them "you aren't writing documentation or using the bug tracker because you aren't a very talented coder and you have no common sense". I have seen this management style tried, and it doesn't work: it just makes everyone unhappier, and it focuses their unhappiness on you.

If you want to tinker with a dysfunctional company instead of just running for the hills, you need to (a) recruit allies, (b) equip your allies with powerful Jedi mind tricks that they can use on their less-enlightened management, and (c) find ways to maneuver problematic people out of the way of your allies -- or, if necessary, destroy them. This is why there is always a Methodology lying around -- and why, when one dies, another is always there to take its place. A Methodology is a rhetorical weapon, designed for just these purposes.

(a) It's not an accident that Methodologies evolve cultlike features. So does every effort to recruit a bunch of people to a cause, whether it's a fraternity, a political movement, a school of software development, a message board for hackers, or, you know, an actual cult. "Join me and we will fix the company."

(b) The Methodology eventually evolves expensive consultants in suits, and industry-standard buzzwords and rituals whose magical powers are strong and unquestioned. This is important. If your buzzwords aren't magic, nobody will listen to you unless they have common sense, which is very unreliable. Remember when Java was on the uptake, and you couldn't sell anything to a corporation unless it somehow involved J2EE? "Don't worry, Higher Management. We are not merely employing our own native talent and common sense. We are using an Accepted Methodology as endorsed by Higher Powers. You don't need to see our identification; these aren't the droids you're looking for."

(c) I have never heard of a "Scrum Manager" before, and I agree that he or she has a very silly name, but I think I already know what this person is for. This person is there to provide a second manager that is empowered to talk back to the first one, who may well be clueless (at least part of the time). The original poster actually understands this. He just doesn't accept it. He has yet to accept that occasionally-clueless managers, let alone permanently clueless managers, are a fact of life. He seems to think that you can somehow avoid having clueless managers, or fix them by appealing to their common sense. [2] Give him time. Someday he will stop bemoaning the needless existence of powerful weapons and start learning how to use them. "Mister Manager, sir, if you don't stop insisting on screwing up our work I'm going to have our Scrum Manager report you to the Methodology Police."

Unfortunately, like Harry Potter's magic or the Force, Methodology is just a tool. The fact that people are using it all the time, brandishing its most powerful aspects in broad daylight, doesn't mean that things are going well or that the forces of good are necessarily going to win out. Quite the opposite, really. Someone whose projects are well-managed will appear to be living a comfortable, slightly boring life in his home in the swamp, and will rarely be heard employing a Methodology out loud.

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[1] As opposed to garden-variety methodology, which is fine and -- for the talented -- is just "common sense".

[2] Those of us without nominal managers -- startup co-founders and independent consultants -- shouldn't feel too smug here. Clueless customers and clueless clients can be every bit as problematic as clueless managers.