Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

@6rfp: Given some of our individual wells cost north of $100 million and have multiple unrecoverable completion steps, quick and repeat as needed is simply not the right model (reference BP's Deepwater Horizon) ... need I say more?

Agile works when you're working with Lego blocks and can afford to knock them down and rebuild them. Agile is way too costly and ineffective for any project north of $1 million.

I@4nel: Petrotech (geology, geophysics, petrol engineering) provides the foundation for everything we do. IT is simply a support function along with HR and the cafeteria staff. Designing enterprise management structures that may (or may not) work well for support staff, but is disruptive to our core mission, is my definition of stupid.

I love the part where you think petroleum engineers are extremely technically competent and IT is low skill labor.

Petrotechs are literal paper pushers.

@4mle: Abused or simply misguided from the start? Commonly the push to get a MCP to a decision gate (by whatever terms you wish to use) can’t be compartmentalized into a closed sprint team with short-term focus, as this leads naturally to the weakest link causing failure. Highly technical work requires scoping, peer review, and potentially getting input from enterprise subject matter experts: Combined with a deliberate reshuffling of resources to get all the many parts of a MCP analysis completed together. The petrophysical work might be easy for an individual contributor to handle whereas the seismic processing might prove more complicated such that it requires consulting with a broader group of experts (or visa versa, depending on the broader project goals and challenges). The idea that you can pull together an isolated group for a sprint might be reasonable for simple IT projects where there is a broad pool of low-skill interchangeable workers to address each sprint goal, but this is simply a misguided model for how we work in the petroleum industry! The better model was to have community of practices within each specialty that were somewhat independent from individual projects with experts available to jump in to provide guidance to individual practitioners working individual projects. The whole community of practice concept and the building up and interactions between experts is alien to Agile, which is why the “transformation” has led to a terrible loss of core technology competency across the enterprise.

Chevron completely abused Agile

The way Agile is supposed to be used is that agile team members must expend 100% of their time on the Agile Project.

If they do not and spend many times per week fighting fires on fixing issues with other things (like profitable legacy systems) it simply does not work.

Every person I know who works on Agile team at Chevron is not working on them full time.

What this does is it put undue stress on agile team members as they cut corners to "finish" the sprints on time (so they look good). Quality suffers. The parts of the system that are hard get delayed using the excuse "we will fix it in a later sprint" and THAT never happens , so it ends up costing more and delays are increased.

@2mcj The problem is that Agile was sold to management as the enterprise solution, rather than being just for small IT projects. It was a huge mistake for long term MCP (short term micro management focus was not fit for purpose at all), which are the bread and butter of our industry.

Chevron is great at sc--wing up project methodologies that are used successfully across a multitude industries.

CPDEP (waterfall) was way over bloated for most projects, especially in IT space, but makes perfect sense for MCPs and other massive projects. Agile is great mindset but the way it was implemented with SAFe for everyone, was a terrible idea. Scrum and Kanban can be used successfully across lots of teams without the overhead of SAFe. But it's not for everything.

The same happened Lean Sigma when it got Chevronized. A pretty simple and straightforward process for looking at processes and improving them was again turned into some massive administrative process. The hard push to get a million green belts was another terrible idea. Should have been much more surgical.

The one size fits all mindset has got to change.

The amount of waste in CPDEP with all the DRBs, ridiculous amounts of documentation that was never read, etc. was ridiculous. Analysis paralysis.

@tdf, the best-kept secret about CPDEP was that there were managers who knew how to fast-track the process and get things done. Usually involved 'private' lunches with key DRB members (I guess what you call 'stakeholder analysis'). There was one BU (unfortunately now defunct) that flourished in this environment.

@1vvo, you forgot to mention that none of your DRB members bothered to look at your well-honed deck. Too busy, you'll be told. Just give us the highlights, you'll be told, while they're working on their chateaubriand.

My supervisor recently said he’d like me to gain ”Agile fluency”. Read the terrain man. I can’t imagine a skill I’d rather have less fluency in.

“It’s not about Agile”… yes it is about agile and a bunch of other stupid MBA inspired nonsense. Not fit for purpose for this industry. Totally misguided and need to go!

Yeah either way agile or not, if management are not prepared to try and understand what is going on, and continue to only manage upwards, projects will continue to be totally fu---d. Chevron is currently churning out useless leaders that can't do anything practically useful to our core business, it's all fluff and BS. I'm not sure DEI is to blame, it's more hubris and echo chambers at the highest levels.

It’s not about Agile. It’s about the leadership, or the lack thereof.

Can’t wait to start working on a 70 page museum-quality DRB deck, and then get a dozen DRB members together for a 3 hour catered lunch meeting to sit around and watch each other pass gas.

SAFE != Agile

You really think Google is using SAFE?

The true developers of agile never intended it to be used (and abused) the way it has been by self-serving consultants and mendacious upper management (I knew a few of them).

Have you seen what the agile coaches now bill at?? Yeeeeesssshhhhgg

Yep it sure was. CPDEP as a process was great but the application of it was abused by people making a career out of creating unnecessary work or selling themselves as saviors for stopping projects rather then using the process to make good decisions. This, in addition to dishonest incomplete and spun loopbacks ki-led a great project management system. Agile was sold as an alternative to replace but it is is designed for small short term nimble projects and not large scale capital projects. Musk can let a rocket fail and fall out of the sky and try again but our industry can not afford to have a platform fall into the sea. The promotion of inexperienced people into decision roles has really cost our company both short and long term. Sorry Experience and real deal oil people matter