I work at a smallish company as a software lead. So far I have lead one team for the full duration of the project, and have been managing my current team for about 6 months. While the previous project had quite a few problems, which were all out of my hands, everyone in management has told me that I did a really good job of managing what was in my control. For the current project, we have yet to have trouble meeting our milestones, even though we have less resources than originally planned.
The problem is that for the past 3 or 4 months, upper management has started to micromanage me, specifically when it comes to sprints. In addition to the daily team stand-ups, management has scheduled daily meetings with the team leads to discuss the sprints progress. Management also decided exactly how a sprint should look, how tasks should be allocated, and how sprints should be planned. Specifically, I'm told that the team must be overallocated by 10% (i.e. everyone should be 10% over capacity for a sprint) as one of the managers believes this helps motivate the team to work harder. Also, every sprint has to have a "bug bucket" to account for the hours that might have to go to bugs. Then, as the sprint progresses, the team members are expected to stay somewhere between full capacity and 110%, and the teams overall burndown should be below the "ideal trend".
But the thing is, I completely disagree with all of these methodologies, especially since managing these expectations leads me to have almost no time to develop and instead my time is spent doing analytics. I personally think that constantly overallocating people just makes it look like they aren't doing anything, and makes them feel like they can't ever succeed. I also disagree with bug buckets as they make it hard to plan on the remaining capacity in a sprint for fixing bugs. On top of this disagreement, spending all my time doing analytics has left the software engineers on my team to feel neglected - they aren't getting the feedback they want so that they can improve themselves as I don't have the time to do design, architecture, and code reviews.
I'm at the point where it's getting very frustrating for me to have to deal with it, but I don't know the best way to express my frustration. Any attempts I've made to try a different sprint methodology have been immediately shut down. I've also suggested reducing the number of meetings between leadership and management, but that was also ignored.
TLDR: Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with management micromanaging their software lead? Dealing with this daily has made me miserably to the point that it's starting to affect my health, so even short term it's not sustainable.