Thread regarding Nike Inc. layoffs

Dang, here we go again! Another one bites the dust this week, and it's lookin' like they're axing folks who aren't on that ACN project. You'd think with 20 years under their belt and all the connections they've made, they'd have second thoughts about giving them the boot so fast.
But nope, gotta jump on the ACN bandwagon or get outta Dodge, it seems. Those of us left are just hangin' on, hopin' for the best. It's a real bummer, man.

And get this: DJ, MF, and CF are probably high-fivin' each other, thinkin' they can sweep this whole mess under the rug. What a freakin' sh-t show. And to top it off, nothin' but crickets from ER about our concerns. Guess those management clowns have their pockets lined, and who knows where all that money's goin'.

There have been at least 5 unplanned outages so far and counting. Performance this week was presented as acceptable, but there's an underlying issue that's being overlooked. Critical high-volume processing of costing release job runs has been halted to showcase system as functioning. great work leaders..

Our recent failover testing failed, with the giants ACN, SAP, Microsoft and SuSe helping implement patch fixes. This is a significant concern as if systems continue to fail, there is no easy recovery and possibly additional outages. Is it worth investing the consulting dollars? Seriously SLT needs to evaluate the performance between our old ECC and the new S/4 systems. The previous ECC system was reliable and robust, while the S/4 system appears to be broken and this is a problem with the product itself. It's unclear why the decision was made to invest several dollars in S/4, considering its current state. ACN has not been supportive when it comes to SAP implementation. not sure if anyone remembers Converse implementation..

The S/4 system has been plagued with issues from the start. Integration problems, constant downtime, and unresponsive support have turned what should have been an upgrade into a nightmare. It’s as if we’ve moved from a reliable workhorse to a flashy, overpriced car that spends more time in the shop than on the road.

ACN's involvement has been marred by poor project management, missed deadlines, and a blatant disregard for our business needs. They’ve repeatedly failed to deliver on promises, leaving us to pick up the pieces. Internal reports have highlighted that critical milestones were missed due to Accenture’s mismanagement, resulting in additional costs and extended project timelines.

It’s time to demand better from our vendors and stop settling for subpar performance. ACN has proven time and again that they are not up to the task. We need to explore alternative options driven by good Nike Leaders who are capable of providing the support and reliability we need to succeed.

Look at all those downvotes out of nowhere. Someone with a vested financial interest & a vpn found this thread.

@fqri+1tut1OdB. I wrote that post. Your reply is totally reasonable, however, there is a big difference between Blame & Accountability.

The blame game is easy to play and well suited to the ignorant (not pointing at you) and uninformed or the lazy. It generally has no constructive outcome and only serves to make things more dysfunctional.

Accountability seems to be your goal and while I agree it’s important, how can/does that play out over a 5+ year program that has seen countless turnover? Example - The Rat chose and discarded multiple VPs for SEC during his tenure - do the VPs that just happen to have actually gotten us through a go-live take the fall for many decisions made both before their time and above their grade? Who actually chose SAP S4? Not the current crew. Who choose ACN - not this crew either. CF & MF were pulled in to fix a complete cluster of a program and by my estimation have been the most successful of all the VPs put in these roles.

To address your callouts about who should be giving updates - the ELT audience isn’t interested in technical details at any level beyond what they’re already getting. It’s over their heads because they aren’t tech and they aren’t close enough to it all. They are getting the updates CTIO wants them to get - she makes that call and no one else. It’s her story to spin how she wants. I think it isn’t productive but that is how the ELT works - they craft their own stories and the VPs message as best they can w/in those parameters.

As for the teams - none of them are w/o fault in this scenario. Nike teams in the past were treated poorly by ACN - that’s on The Rat who insisted on ACN being in the drivers seat and listened to and trusted them more than he did internal Nike ppl. By the time he left things were too far along to significantly change the model and oust ACN. Additionally, the Nike teams have the mistaken idea that because they know Nike best they should call all the shots - problem is they don’t know the S4 solution as well as ACN & SAP. They aren’t qualified to do this alone (pains me to say that because I have so much respect for all of them but it’s true) and many of them are still living in the past with ACN and following in JS’s footsteps of refusing to play well with others due to outsized egos. Going to war with your partners is stupid and counterproductive, so despite the bad history the best way to get things done is to work together. Additionally, no one in current Nike leadership can be accountable for what as of now appears to be issues with the S4 product itself - they can only be accountable for how they manage through a sh!t situation.

I believe there are many lessons to be learned from this program from Day 1 to the the final go-live and I have faith many AARs will happen when ppl get their heads above water so they can get better. For now though, simplifying all of this into an anonymous blame game isn’t helpful (again - not pointing at you personally fqri+1tut1OdB).

I’ve been on countless SAP implementation teams at many companies and none were even close to this magnitude (I’ve been on some w/ companies that are larger than Nike) and all of them had similar challenges. Implementing an ERP system is beyond challenging and I’ve never seen one w/o issues. It’s the nature of the beast due to the complexity of the tech product and business operations.

This is just my 2 cents and food for thought for folks that may just want to oversimplify a very complex situation with a tremendous amount of history that is needed to have meaningful context. We’re better than this - we can and should level up our perspective a bit and actually take moment or two to be informed and not just talk sh!t here because it soothes our egos or makes us feel superior to trash the people doing so much to make this successful. I am proud of the work these amazing Nike teams and leaders have done to get us here and I hope they feel the same. Nike’s culture is at an all time low and I personally think it’s time to start cheering for our own and that includes the teams & leaders (after all leaders are just people like the rest of us - they just get the biggest targets on their backs). SEC teams & leaders, I know you don’t hear it enough from those outside your bubble, but you have been incredibly dedicated to this effort and many of us see it and appreciate what you’ve done.

BTW - I’m not even on the SEC team just have many colleagues involved, have had experience with SAP implementations in the past, and have stayed close enough through it all to be reasonably well informed. This is to say - you don’t have to be on the team to get perspective before running your mouth (again not directed at you fgri). Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 😬

I have to disagree with the last post and find myself siding with others who have expressed frustration and concerns. Here’s why:Accountability: While large-scale projects are indeed complex and involve multiple stakeholders, accountability is crucial. If there are persistent issues, it’s clear that something has gone fundamentally wrong, and those responsible should be held accountable.VPs and Transparency: Having VPs take the heat might be standard practice, but it doesn’t always lead to transparency or effective problem-solving. Sometimes the individuals on the ground have the most accurate understanding of the issues, and their insights shouldn’t be overlooked.Support for Teams: The effort of the SEC teams is commendable, but the constant finger-pointing is counterproductive. Leadership needs to foster a culture of collaboration, not blame.

Instead of defending the status quo, we need to address these systemic issues openly and constructively. Acknowledging mistakes and learning from them is essential for improvement.

Lots of ignorance in this thread and what’s surprising is how much of it seems to be coming from ppl who sound close enough to SEC to know better.

The performance issues do not appear to be from something the Nike team did or did not do. As they’re digging in it’s becoming clearer that the issue is very likely with Microsoft or SAP. There are many reasons it’s so challenging to pinpoint the cause - it’s a very complex solution, the issues come & go, the various teams have spent to much time pointing fingers at each other, and an S4 deployment of this magnitude has NEVER been done before. Are there human mistakes on the Nike side - for sure, but those aren’t the root cause and seem to come from ppl that ignore the rules around deployments. I assume leadership will identify those folks and hopefully make examples of them.

For the comments about the VPs giving the status updates - you must realize the audience is top level executives and sending in someone below VP to take the heat would be wildly unfair. No VP in their right mind would want to be the one in front of the firing squad at this level but they do it because it is expected by the executive team (they’re very elitist and expect to have convos with other VPs), leadership should be taking accountability (you all would be saying how dare they send some poor IC into this sh-tshow), and they’re trying to protect their teams.

So easy to be quarterbacking from the couch, but that’s not reality. These SEC teams have been ki-ling themselves to get this delivered and it wouldn’t hurt to give them more support rather than throw rocks from afar. Those of you that got laid off from SEC (I know 1000% some of you are stirring the pot on here) need to get over yourselves and stop trying to make things worse out of bitterness.

1 more week of performance pains completed. Thank God, we don't have any plans for this weekend.

I hear the VP mention "delta merge" and they need to get the parameters right. Looks like figuring the parameter needs truck loads fo ACN and SAP consultants!!! Rocket science for sure and the stable system is just a 😃joke!!!

There is so much trust in ACN. The morale of platform and Basis engineering is extremely low and the team has spent millions of hours of energy, blood and sweat to get this in the right shape. It almost looks like there is surely some kind of career support for the leadership from ACN. DJ and MF treat the employees as floor mat.

I'm looking for another job and will hope rest of the team follows when our advises or recommendations fall in deaf ears.

How are we going to realize that we need a strong robust performance test platform! We failed and couldn't simulate what we saw in production in the various test cycles and mock environments. We continue to drive decision based on inputs from ACN. Very little to no collaboration between teams. There is also so much politics amongst all the issues going around.

On the ground, Engineering and platform group doesn't seem aligned. MF/ CF seems to be drinking cool aid and going by ACN verdict. No trust on Nike talent to review vendor recommendations.

Another day at the office looking for SAP speed examples and funny the users kept complaining about slow performance and the VP made another lame excuse. Just sharing nothing is rocket science..

I heard it is an S1 and they still don't have an eta? Lol! A bunch of clowns...

And there you go.. this system has been down for more than 12 hours.. welcome to the new world North America! EMEA is next. Our teams (SAP platform) have not been able to even predict a good outage end time and it is a shame; so there has been no comms whatsoever..

VP is so sure everything is good with performance but we still need outages to keep this experimental machine running.

By the way, is the platform team leads not capable of giving status on incidents and needs SLT to run the show or did we loose everyone during the reorg ?

F’g dumpster fire from day 1. No project this large should be delivering zero functionality improvements … or be using experimental non-proven home grown tech that’s not ready for prime time volumes. Bottlenecks everywhere. Speed of business… lmao

Nike has always prioritized short term vision but it has gotten insane since they started looking for pennies in the cough cushions.

My team is critical to Nike functioning, wholesale and digital. If anything breaks everything stops. We’re at 150% turnover, basically no FTE left. +50 services. +50 critical security vulnerabilities. 30 servers that each need a week’s worth of maintenance minimum. Features have long since been abandoned even ones that were guaranteed to drive more revenue than they cost.
The only way we’ve been getting by was leveraging every last one of Nike’s platform & support teams for all they had, but they’ve all been cut to the bone too.

Nike has turned cost centers into cut centers. I know I’m not alone here.

Mark my words, the next year or two is going to see things start falling apart in ways visible enough for the media to notice. Parts of the business will regularly go down for +24 hours.

…and I think I’m done. This post made me realize how miserable my life will be if I continue holding this all together. There’s no up side to sticking around. Nike has been my entire career and I loved how relaxed its vibe used to be.

Does anyone else feel like we're more focused on quick fixes than actually solving the root problems? Just a few months back, any kind of outage would result in serious scrutiny AAR and action/problems to prevent it from happening again. Now we are spending more money on the vendors (Microsoft and SAP) to give us an answer..why did they even hire ACN to do this job?

Now it's like, "Oops, but at least we fixed it fast!" This mindset is going to hurt us in the long run? Thank God we did not go live in Jan and it would have been a disaster amidst loosing awesome talent..

GREEN TO YELLOW? Possibly RED when your system experiences an unplanned outage or requires a 10-hour maintenance window over the weekend to keep the business running with abysmal performance!

Does anyone care? Is there any consideration for the MA EMEA project, or will they give up and keep the legacy systems running as-is? Has anyone questioned how much has been invested in this program? Now that we have a template and the talent to execute the program, leadership should seriously consider ending the partnership with ACN. This move could save a significant amount of money and potentially prevent two cycles of planned layoffs :-).

gentle reminder that JD was the one who brought in ACN and shoved it down SEC's throat in the first place -- and that the Rat had threatened people who didn't want to go along with it

“In less than 5 hours” is the kind of failed salesmanship that has become a pandemic after we replaced the do’ers with the cheapest bodies we could find on the planet.

I remember a time when a 30 minute outage would result in your team getting grilled by your skip’s skip, and everything getting dropped to make sure it doesn’t happen again. “Every minute we’re offline costs the company X million dollars! 🤬”

Now as long as the fires have been dampened before WHQ wakes up “Oopsies! But look how FAST we fixed the problem! …but really, what else are you going to do? Spend MORE money? HAhaHAHAha…”

Production system went down and was recovered fully in less than 5 hours.

Funny, the production system went down today and we still have a VP sugar coating and hiding how bad things really are..

Billions and billions in GT every year and you cannot still get logged with OKTA. Congrats Nike!

Accenture for SEC MANA
Deloitte for HR Workday

Looks like Nike has no tech talent

There is so much burn out for people in SEC that take accountability for their work. Stretching over weekends, spending less time with family and kids. Then there are other people that just treat shift work as another day in the office and only do what is needed. The problem is with all the politics revolving after the reorg you now see the Sr. Dir trying to grab power, trying to change things and operational and run model.. running a tech org with no sense of technical knowledge is amusing and pathetic. This applies to some of the new leadership crop and looks like ACN is favored overall and these less knowledgeable persons are dependent on ACN for their growth.

I feel bad for the platform engineers that have vast amount of knowledge and ownership/accountability unable to manage their leader. The performance issues seen in the system would have been resolved if the application, platform and capability team work as one team keeping aside the ego and politics. Get a true technical leader driving decisions and managing the outcome..

Accenture costs 3x-8x what an FTE costs. They create the metrics for the program, so much of the work (poorly), set the schedule and seemingly write their own checks. VP leadership is weak and obviously has some “career” support agreements with them. Any precious Nike leadership would have kicked them out 2-3 years ago.

Accenture is why it’s so expensive. Next is egos and fiefdoms over doing what’s right for Nike. Third is architects & developers with no business process knowledge. Fourth is business teams with little to no knowledge of their own processes and inability to state what their requirements are. Missing ingredient? SME’s. Maybe keeping them was important, maybe creating a culture that develops & retains them instead of pushing them out the door would be a good thing? SME types burn out from fighting back against the MVP and ‘not my issue’ crowd. People who want to make things better need to be empowered to do so, listened to, … and a pipeline created to make more of them - which means hiring and training less experienced people to grow into those roles. The revolving door of inexperience (I.e., the Frontline model), makes each successive generation less knowledgeable… which has pushed its way like a disease into the development, product, and architecture teams. Want to be better & smarter? Then be better and smarter - everywhere.

All groups were bloated before the layoff, some still are.

Lot of problems and politics in SEC. They got rid of JS and now TF seems broken.. DJ is running his show with ACN and his env leads. Not talking and trusting his own tea.. sidelining the previous leaders .. and the VP is just watching and giving status updates on incidents.. and passing the wrong information.. looks like they still did not understand ACN is here for the money ..

It's not just SEC. Many Director, Sr Director, and VP roles created or upbanded in the last 10 years hardly do any work. While it's good that the recent layoffs focused on "cutting from the top," some areas were missed and others were misjudged.