An Example Dysfunctional Contract Relationship

In an online forum:

Q: I am having a struggle with our contractor over scrum meetings. I am proposing that only the scrum master (me) and the developers (contractors) attend a standard 15 minute scrum meeting daily. The contractor is insisting that their project manager needs to attend to ensure that effective management and to communicate tasks. My argument is that is the job of the scrum master and the PM should get that information at the scrum of scrums. Anyone have any thoughts on this matter?

There are so many contradictions with Scrum here I don’t know where to start.

Scrum intentionally eliminates the project manager role to create space for team self management. This is a much more important part of Scrum than any 15 minute meeting!

Outside stakeholders are welcome at the Sprint Review Meeting, to help the Product Owner inspect and adapt the product increment. If stakeholders don’t like what the teams are doing, their beef is with the Product Owner. “Scrum of Scrums” was disavowed by Ken Schwaber years ago.

The Scrum Master also should not be coordinating tasks – that’s the team’s job.

This “Keep Project Managers Away From The Teams” section may help: https://less.works/less/adoption/getting-started.html#5KeepProjectManagersAwayfromtheTeams

It’s likely that the contracting relationship is an underlying cause of some of this, in which case I’d recommend reading https://agilecontracts.org for some better alternatives.