Product Owner keeps demanding developers do items outside of Sprint, deleted story points to get extra items in, signs off holiday for my staff, even hired some unqualified developers, etc. for my team (I'm the Dev Manager). I'm blessed to report into the PMO who backs up the Product Owner, in front my own reports, meaning I have no authority. What would you do?

PMO has decided that if we drag items from Sprint to Backlog when they reach SIT, we have more space for Dev items in the Sprint :-| Though he expects developers to actually do the SIT work, including writing the SIT tests :-|

Scrap scrum entirely. There's no point in using it, it's being undermined to the point that sprints are meaningless in that scenario. Try working with Kanban instead, with a hard task-based WIP limit. You should do backlog / story refinement and use detailed acceptance criteria, but with no time estimation. That way storypoints aren't required, there's no estimate for when tasks will be done at the end of a sprint, and they simply need to choose the (maximum 3-4 or so) things they want your team working on at any one time. If they want to drag something else in, then they physically need to drag something else out (i.e. tell you to stop working on it.)

If that were me though I'd be looking for employment elsewhere, fast.

@AlmondSauce I am not sure the “limit to 3-4” will work with a boss like that but the kanban us a good idea.

The important point is to always put things in order of priority, “is this more important than that”

That way you push the prioritization to the boss that will have to choose what to focus on, and a physical visible board also prevents hiding that priority.

But yes, the inly long term solution is switching boss, one way of another.