I've got a bit of an involved question, here. (Apologies if I provided too much unnecessary explanation; if so just skip to 'The Problem'.) First, let me explain...
The Situation:
We're a middling-size company with a relatively small development department - 7 people. Until recently, pretty much all the work that came in was fairly small stuff, assigned to a single person, with the only project management being a simple ticket system (which no one even really used that often, anyway). Now, however, we've got a significantly-sized project - estimated at 18 months. For the sake of this project, we've started using actual project management techniques - in this case, Scrum.
The Team:
We started the project with a team of one full-time employee developer, two contract-employee developers, a Product Owner (her theoretical job title is 'project manager', though because we're so understaffed she ended up also being Product Owner, BA, and QA), and the project owner, who is the CIO. We recently (a few months back) also added a senior developer, who works with completely different technologies and has some trouble communicating effectively, into our team to work on certain tasks only she can accomplish - or even fully understand. The developers all work together, in a single cubicle, while the PO and CIO work in a separate building, about a two-minute walk away.
The PO is great, having recently completed a Project-Management-Scrum course before being hired, and the developers were anxious to finally get some sort of project structure, so we've generally got good buy-in from them.
As for the CIO, his opinion was along the lines of 'I don't care how you organize yourselves, just get it done.' This later morphed into slight push-back when he realized how different Agile was from the Waterfall he's used to, but since everyone else in the department strongly dislikes Waterfall, he's mostly backed off - but also remains mostly uninvolved.
Myself:
I am one of the aforementioned contract-employees. I'm also a junior developer... and also the Scrummaster. A strange choice, I realize, but since I'm the only one who's had any actual experience with Scrum, I was pretty much nominated. I'm not a certified Scrummaster by any means, but seeing as we're a year into the project and nothing's on fire yet, I figure things aren't going too badly.
The Problem:
We started out doing Scrum mostly 'by the book' (Scrum from the Trenches, specifically) - daily standup (which consisted of developers), pre-planning meeting (where just the developers hash out the technical details of stories), planning meeting (where the devs estimate the stories with the PO's assistance), demo, retrospective.
However, for the daily standup, demo, and retrospective, interest quickly waned.
There were several mild complaints about the daily standup - "Why bother, when we all sit two metres from each other all the time?" Of note is the fact that neither the PO nor the CIO were present at the daily standups (should they have been?). So over time, as people were late or busy and I'd forget to conduct the meetings, they just sort of got phased out, and we don't do them anymore.
As for the demo, we originally had the CIO involved, but he was worried he'd stifle the project after there were repeated occasions of him mentioning a change and that change not being implemented immediately - leading to him mistakenly believing that we wanted him to stop providing feedback, so he stopped attending fairly early. Several months after that, it was decided that we needed to start having Quality Assurance... despite not having a QA. So the PO got roped into becoming the QA. And so, since she had already gone over every single story during the QA process, she considered attending the demo to be redundant. After that, the demo pretty quickly got dropped, as focus shifted to completing features over 'wasting' time preparing and implementing a demo that only the developers would see. I've brought up the remaining benefits of the demo (that it's a good form of retrospection, and that it's a useful additional bug-check), and while the other developers agree with me, none of them seem to have any interest in actually putting forth the 5-minutes-of-work-per-story to actually accomplish a demo.
And now, as we near the first milestone, pressure mounts, and stories become increasingly less-well defined (did I mention that our PO is also a BA and a QA?), the retrospective and pre-planning meetings have started falling off as well. I've received much positive feedback about the pre-planning, so I'm sure that will pick back up again once the milestone passes, but I worry the retrospective may end up dead in the water as well. I haven't even bothered attempting to fold the senior developer into the retrospective, since she's well behind schedule and working on a bunch of different projects at once. Should I attempt, regardless? What about the CIO?
While I realize that part of Agile is the ability to modify processes to fit the environment, I worry that these meetings have been erroneously, or at least prematurely, pruned. It's possible that my own lack of understanding of, or inability to convey, the purposes of these meetings has contributed to this.
Should I just accept that these meetings don't fit well into this organization and allow them to disappear? If not, what can I do to improve buy-in for them? Should I request that the PO attend the stand-ups? Can/should I just exercise my 'authority' as Scrummaster to force people to attend these meetings (keeping in mind that I have little formal authority, since my official position is junior developer, not Scrummaster)?
What do I do?