I've always been in favour of communication and working practices that speed up our everyday, so I explained my coordinator about Scrum 2 years ago or so. We finally applied this a year ago, with results that kept getting better and better after every sprint. My coord even got his Scrum Master certification.
Dailies were fast and meaningful. Goals were met (the majority, and new issues were swiftly negotiated with our Product Owner to take lower priority objectives out of the scrum). Communication was perfect, quick and easygoing with everyone in the team. We were in a dream.
After less than 6 months, something changed. The PO went back to micromanage the whole team, framing us too much. Dailies went from 6-8 minutes for 4 people to more than 20 in some cases. Sprints are now "overridden" without paying attention to times or priorities, everything "goes on top" of the stack. We don't modify the sprints anymore, and they're making us look like uncommited (as the goals are not achieved).
Plus, this week, our SM left for holidays for the whole week. The PO has crossed with me more than 40 emails in 5 days, that ended up containing about 20 hours of new unpredicted (and unpredictable) """top priority""" work. Plus, the SM had a task last week to redo all the new sprint post-its (yeah, he has always done the post-its on his own). He didn't and told us to do by ourselves. 2 of us did it, one hasn't, and we didn't do any daily for the whole week. After I suggested we should, the one with the outdated post-its simply said he was really busy.
I am not the SM, but since I was always the pusher, I feel responsible for this. The end is near and sadly crystal clear. I can account 2 more sprints, followed by going back to our previous system (estimating for 3-months long periods, and not achieving even a fifth of the expected).
This end needs to change. I don't know how, and where to start, but I know that when to start is 6 months ago. Any way to roll the problems back?