Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

If we cut 100% of the Agile Chapter, would Chevron stop producing oil?

Chevron IT has too many agile roles. They are mainly overhead that don't provide too much value. Some scrum masters are very good because they were good project managers. Many scrum masters are horrible. Some release train engineers are good because they were good project managers. But the majority of them do not have a real train to manage. There is no point to having a product line manager when there's not really a true product line in many cases. Random projects (not products, sorry) that you group together as a product line doesn't make a real product line. So we have a product line manager, and product owners over random stuff. And release train engineers without real trains, and terrible scrum masters.

Just let the developers interact with the actual end users from the business units (no, not the POs from the platforms who have not been in a BU in ages, or ever). Cut out the multiple middlemen and women.

the groups that have truly been agile in the past are slowed down (essentially stopped completely in place) and no longer agile because we had to place all these non-technical supervisors somewhere in ImagineIT selections. agile chapter they go. everybody takes training and they are taught what ceremonies to run. it is a huge waste of company resources.

yes, this is related to layoffs because IT is still very bloated. and guess which chapter is one of the biggest?

@3tbjp p-tmeet kettle. that is such an antiquated way of thinking about business units, who actually have many more true subject matter experts – and with all the push for citizen development in the past 2-3 years, these people are actually MUCH more technical than those in the center, who have resorted to doing tasks like "evaluating vendor products". they don't even know how to do the real work anymore. and CTC is HQ. the problem is that HQ is full of people who have been away from the business units, or worse, never been in a business unit at all. what gets barrels out of the ground? certainly not agile.

HQ sends out word to get digital, so CTC complies. However, with decentralized BUs, they basically refuse to adopt. They prefer their old manual process or Excel worksheet to anything 21st century that could save them 95% of their time and eliminate errors. The BUs are full of idiots.

the dork who teaches PO and PM training and likes to "ask questions" during townhalls by inflating his own knowledge of agile is exactly what's wrong with chevron IT.

don't worry, we are about to start PRE-PI planning. It is typical Chevron to have a planning meeting for the planning meeting, in which the planning meeting has 100+ people who have no idea what they really need to deliver because the business people have already given up.

I was shocked, but maybe I shouldn't be, when I heard there were something called a "proxy product owner". we also have product owners who are mostly just UC or ETC people. and the IT project managers (renamed some stupid agile title, but still basically a PM) think that the product owner who has only worked in the center actually knows how to run a business.

so we have incompetent IT project managers who don't know anything about the business, and then a middleman translator called a "product owner" who also doesn't know how to run a business. so they bring in a "proxy" product owner (some IT person who was saved in the ROM) to teach the PO how to do agile ceremonies.

Meanwhile, we have actually good developers who are looking for jobs at Google and Facebook, while the mediocre developers are trying to figure out how to get out of 100 meetings a day. Additionally, a lot of the work is being outsourced to accenture, who also just have project management overhead, trying to lead some developers in "low cost geographies" who have no idea what we are doing.

So, yeah, it is going pretty damn well.

Don't wanna be "that guy or girl", but doe's anyone know where the layoff forum is?

I like how we designed the whole IT org with the terminology of Spotify's "chapters" and the incompetent guy who was in charge of this design said it's actually all based on SAFe. Yet there was a big push to align messages with the decision making COE to say that Chevron will execute projects with all sorts of methodologies, including waterfall, agile, kanban, and not necessarily all about SAFe.

Yet, we have designed all these positions based on it. And the IT leadership team don't even know how to properly execute SAFe because all of us in the chapters are dedicated to platforms, seemingly 100%. We get our team assignments and that's it. Pre-PI planning is supposed to be coming up, and there is not any flexibility to what I would work on because my platform team lead only knows how to manage us like a siloed organization.

We were all selected based on the nonsense we put in our GO400-2, and now we have random teams where people don't actually know each other, worked with each other, or have any idea of what we are doing on a team. This was completely botched by ImagineIT. Blow up the org, and start a new one where people have no idea what they're doing. You think the scrum masters will be able to do their jobs and remove barriers for the team? They don't even know what skills these team members have.

CIO and new FLT must have read this thread. It seems that they left the Agile chapter and sub-chapter lead positions open. Because the people who rolled this out to all of Chevron have done a sh!t job with it and don't deserve to be leading this group again. For once, the (non-)selections are actually the right calls to make.

Even more incredible is that the IT Managers on ImagineIT team EOI'ed. They must have taken the CIO's request to do a gut check and realized they can't deliver with the guardrails and what they have been reciting from BCG. CVX missed the boat to do a clean slate on IT Functional leadership team - J.

@2xmy - nobody knows what you're talking about because they're too busy grooming their backlogs

It will always be fake agile until transform workforce become true DOERS which is the typical agile team. We have been to many IT teams where only 1 person is truly the problem solver & delivering and the rest is "coordinating", calling customers, etc. If you look at Linked In requirements for Software Managers, Architect, etc - minimum requirement is OO programming background, modelling and also design. If we ask an Simple interview questions like "Design a Parking Lot" (which is a typical question in interviews) to most Chevron folks (managers, architects, developers), many might think of an physical parking lot design instead of an Object Model of a new Parking Lot system. Until we have this type of workforce, people will continue to go and do Fake Agile and read Gartner for their talking points

For the most part, yeah it is FAKE AGILE w/ SAFE - since every time I go through a "dog and pony" PI Planning & demo mostly folks are not really delivering anything but a bunch of SPIKE STORIES ONLY; while when we spent tons of $$$ staying at a Hotel just to do PI planning. Again, SAFE is another process for people who don't really know what is really going on in the "kitchen". Probably makes them feel better that things look to be moving forward – "on paper". That said, I have seen Agile (not SAFE) work at Chevron BUT only for a small group of agile team w/ strong PO, employee tech leaders (folks still somewhat competitive outside of CVX) and w/ SW engineers & QA Engineers within the team. But most of CVX emphasis on "process" like SAFE & EVEN THAT AZURE PIPELINE (which is a really a release GOVERNANCE process) NO ONE THINKS LIKE A STARTUP... and ask "do I really save CVX money on this?" In startups or lean companies, they use AUTOMATION A LOT... with engineers who can code to automate all the manual stuff so they focus on the big ticket items. All CVX need is really simple... forget silly over-engineered SAFE processes - just hire strong technical leaders (similar to bay area qualifications like w/ strong System Design/OO architecture background), get strong dev & QA engineers in teams (with strong leaders, they cannot be BSed by contracting agencies)...let them do normal Agile (based on agile manifesto) and things will start to really move....

In this company what really matters is that you are able to remember the acronyms, their basic definition and the corporate leader that is pushing to implement it (naming it using first name to highlight your fraternity with this individual). But know how, substance, results....ZERO. We have not even mastered the art of scoping a project, much less become SME's in Lean Sigma, Agile, etc...

SAFe is an insult to real agile. How many hours across the company are spent right now consolidating ADO boards for the platforms to have one backlog to rule them all.

" 1) No one is talking with or observing the software users and there is no continuous feedback loop between users and teams; there are no true end users."

God is THAT not truth! There have never been feedback any real "paid attention to" feedback from end users EVER in the life of any re-branded software. Chevron buys the cheapest solution off the shelf and shoe horns it into place and expects the end user to be productive . We all know the names of the offending horse manure. The users have to suffer years of abuse trying to actually make it work. Then Chevron re-brands it under yet another moniker , and the whole cycle repeats : This latest cloud/Azure manure is the latest iteration. I'm glad I won't be around to suffer through it. I'm now more convinced than ever it's actually deliberate, it keeps the workers bees on their toes and stops them becoming complacent with the old iteration. Business as usual . Standard Operating procedure.

@azs, this is in fact about layoffs. half of the people on the ImagineIT team will be laid off and I guarantee that all of the work that they've been making up for themselves in the past several months will be shelved. they make all the work sound so important if it's logged in ADO. but after they find out the results this week, things will surely quiet down when the people left in the org have to get back to doing real work. we will have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on consultants who created useless powerpoint slides and the g&a that our highest paid IT employees spent to create this garbage. The good news is that we can all move forward now. we should have never let the people who are going to take a fat package be the ones to design the organization. shameful.

Maybe we should move the continuous feedback loop to The Layoff?

Sounds to me like Chevron or it’s leaders already have the answers they want. Now they’re only building the frameworks and tools that provides them those answers. Sound familiar? They are doing what’s been done in this company for a long time... Answer Shopping.

@lbq - I get the overall idea that you posted. The end result is Chevron IT employees being cut. But how we get there is a bit different. We are not "handing it all to Microsoft" at all. Microsoft won't be doing all this low level work that we do. All we are handing over to Microsoft is the data centers to manage. The replacement of the people doing the work is HCL and Accenture as our managed service partners, not Microsoft employees.

I've been saying for a long time that Chevron has very little idea of how to do software development correctly, Not surprising they are cutting ITC and handing much of it over to MSFT. It is like the 80-90's s all over again, No One got fired buying from IBM, MSFT is now the de facto standard. How much has CVX overpaid MSFT in the past. I don't know exactly but I'm sure it not chump change. They could hide THAT when oil was $150 a barrel. Not so easy now which is partly why ITC is being cut so severely - remember the GIL 2 fiasco a few years ago. It's going to take them years to get the Azure cloud functioning as they want . No doubt they are throwing consultants at it like they did before with GIL2 and told to " get it working". It will be interesting to see how that goes!

The ImagineIT team has just about everybody on the CIO extended leadership team of 100+ people doing SAFe. But instead of every team actually knowing what everybody else is doing, they've set up these teams in a way that Chevron only knows how to do. A whole lot of useless/duplicate work for a bunch of overpaid IT managers. The really good managers try to stay away and focus on more important things in the business. The ones trying to get positions are pretending to be working 24/7, as if they were still doing their actual real jobs.

Lastly, everything on those ADO boards that ImagineIT is doing is NOT application or software development. So I'm not sure why they are even doing SAFe at all. They have like 20 scrum masters just telling teams leaders (POs) what to do and how to use ADO. It is a huge waste of time. And Chevron investors should be VERY happy that most of those people will be left standing. Too bad they're all leaving with a fat package. Incredible.