Please give me the approved answer when asked by the business if I think that we've moved to something better in this latest transformation. I'm not good at selling customers the invisible magic undercoating.
26 replies (most recent on top)
@izab, everyone reading is simply overjoyed that you like and agree with your previous post, lmao!
@7dsl+1b1NufqN very well said. part of the reason why agile (IT) is teaching us to be 100% dedicated to something is because they actually don't know our business. they don't know that some tech service is not product development. and they made everything about product development, like we are building applications and only that. the lack of business knowledge is just atrocious in Chevron IT. you have agile people telling the business that because we don't know agile, they need a "proxy" product owner and all they do is help us click buttons and groom the backlog in ADO. they have NO idea how Chevron makes money. buzz phrases like higher return and lower carbon. Forget lower carbon for a minute - because they don't even know what higher return actually means. It's certainly not features and stories. The sad part is that they've brainwashed the CTC business functions to believe that nonsense, too.
It cracks me up when I see people planning an MVP2. No such thing. IT is confused enough about agile and business only serves to confuse them even more. Agile is like Communism, it's best left to reside in the bistros and cafes vs. out in the real world.
To save their a$$es, CTC management will eventually blame the hybrid schedule for the chaos and lack of value creation, and we’ll all be back in the office 100% of the time at some point next year.
As a petrotech for the last 20 years in ETC (now CTC) I have always worked multiple projects at the same time, and such multitasking is the way to be most effective. Projects always have multiple working parts that must be processed in sequence (not parallel). When one project component is delayed, I switch to the next high priority fire. In my small part of the enterprise if everyone focused just one one project at a time most folks would just be waiting to move their contribution to the total forward. Minimum viable product is also a stupid reference, when the focus should be best on time decision.
@6fhy+1b1NufqN We are the kings of cooking the books. No org in the company is better than IT at manipulating numbers. It’s our one special skill.
@6ylo - that is exactly right. right now, the digital platform teams tell us that there is no capacity left, that we need to prioritize and work only on the most important things because we've cut so deeply in this company. but have we really? because of agile and their focus on getting everybody to work on one thing 100% of the time, we now have 5-7 people forming a "small agile team" doing things that 2-3 people used to be able to do. now, you "scale" that across the whole company and you've got one that is way less efficient than the ones before.
we waste more time with all the agile ceremonies than the real task at hand. we waste time grooming backlogs in ADO for tasks that absolutely don't need to be in there. I have seen stories that take longer to write than it takes to just do it. I have sat in PI planning sessions and system demos in which the RTE acts like a talkshow host and has obviously spend too much time trying to be creative and coming up with really d-mb games and horrible dad jokes. if shareholders knew what was happening in the Chevron day-to-day, they would sell immediately because what we are doing is downright embarrassing.
There most glaring issue with agile is that and I quote from someone who was tasked to implement it across the company " It only works well if the people in the Agile team get to work on it 100% of the time" After all, Agile was designed to focus attention on getting really important projects completed on time and under budget. It was never intended to be a methodology with team members distracted by other tasks. We all know of course that is never going to happen at Chevron because employees are constantly interrupted to work on the latest fire that needs putting out. Managers expect Agile to accelerate the project like its the holy grail! and therefore have vested interest in cooking the numbers to make it look like Agile is working, we all know its not. Shh don't tell the executive team. It's so freaking stupid and obviously will never work, but no one is allowed to tell the emperor he is wearing no clothes. Such is the sad state of affair at Chevron which is as we know based around brown nosing the bosses. who don't want to hear "no". Agile will slowly be dropped and replaced with some new stilly fad in a few years and then the cycle repeats, Welcome to Chevron re-brand - fail - rebrand ad infinitum, nothing new here. Fragile lol
Things in IT are so messed up right now, I feel like we’ll get a mini-reorg sooner than we normally do.
@2aro wow, ain't that the truth!!!
we heard that chevron IT was going to become more technical, and we ended up saving all the deadweight and put them in agile. everybody starts getting certified in SAFe and all of a sudden became more valuable than they used to be? it's the same people who give us absolutely nothing. they can chat increased returns and lower carbon because they saw it or heard it from a corporate message, but they have no idea what the really means.
but this time, instead of just being a waste of space on the payroll, they have unfortunately become destructive and spread the garbage to the other parts of the business, like a cancer. we were agile before agile. get these useless turds out of the company please.
The chaos is intentional and sets up IT to ask for more people, money, etc. for the next business cycle to "fix" the problems because the Function was allegedly cut too too much in the transformation. Stoke the fire, reward the Arsonist.
Thank you for expressing your concerns about the Agile process. To address these we have put together a new committee that will soon conduct detailed surveys and then hold work stand down full group workshops where we can discuss office safety and diversity.
On the internet, product owner is advertised as the one job ANYONE can do. No need to be technical. Any id--t can do it. It’s your entryway into the amazing world of tech. So, of course, we created a million PO roles...
My biggest beef with Agile is that our implementation (SAFe) is sooo frickin top heavy with people that I'm still at a loss to describe what their actual function is or how they can spend an entire day doing whatever it is they do.
In the past 4 years I've practiced Agile principles on teams who have adopted aspects, frameworks, and methodologies well before SAFe was foisted upon us. We've always done well managing the usual steady stream of new feature requests, bug items, releasing them in a steady stream, dare I say cadence.
Back then developers spent the majority of their time developing vs. non-participant hostages in the never-ending series of meetings that sound vaguely like duplicates of other never-ending series of meetings you've been added to.
Fast forward to now and we have multiple PO-type roles, and multiple POs. We have some scrum masters that do nothing, and others that do it all to such a point that others unofficially take on their daily duties as they become co-POs. With developers having so much of their time eaten up by make work you see an explosion in backlogs and a business partner that is scratching their heads at how this can be more efficient. In the end nobody says anything because "muh pension"
Agile is not a fit for this industry. All they needed to do was simplify the system that we had. There was some much useless paperwork and meetings just to check a box. The problem is that management has lost sight of the real work and institutes this stuff so they can point to the inanimate object when it goes wrong.
“Quick, like a bunny”
Agility is just the latest fad in an unending series of consultant led rollouts. Its ironic that at a time when we basically arent doing sh*t in terms of drilling wells and bringing new oil to market, we focus on agility. We already were agile. Management not so much. But managers number one goal is to preserve their power. Imagine, instead, a company where managers removed obvious obstacles to their teams’ success instead of creating them. The remote work experiment of 2020 also revealed how much can actually get done without managers daily injection of pompous stupidity.
Who cares. Just sit tight and wait for whatever the next trendy thing is that we are all supposed to switch to in a few years.
As far as i can tell the agile system is that everyone spends all their time discussing management of the problem and no one actually does any work. More efficient would be to just not do any work with no management... cut out the middleman.
It’s obviously better. Love, Bill
Chevron IT'S Transformation is more monsterous then Caitlyn Jenner's.
Agile my ar-e. They changed gears so many effing time that I lost track. I give up. Just collecting a fat paycheck
We are all doing the Agile Elephant Walk my friend. Tighten down on my thumb and I promise not to grip too hard...
Oh and be sure to wear the mask to catch the spew and BS when you do answer....
My computer started and I have access to the S, T,F.U drives. Winning!
Just say yes and give the usual bullish!t answer about how everyone is stabilizing and settling in, of course there are always bumps in the road, it’s a cultural shift, blame the pandemic for any issues, and highlight a few overblown random “wins” that management keeps harping about.