Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

Don’t worry, you haven’t burst your bubble. I have no issue with agile and I’m actually an advocate of agile. But a big thing about agile is that you adapt agile working methods to suit the team. At Chevron, we adapt the team to fit our agile working practices.

In my role, we work individually on individual projects. We are not a team contributing collectively to a shared goal. My product owner and scrum master are both not technical. So I write user stories that barely get read, let along understood, for myself. Our daily standups consist of the team giving status updates to a team that aren’t involved in any one else’s work. And the demos are of things that are of no relevance to most of the team because we work on completely individual tasks.

So you add the task of writing user stories to the endless demos and sprint planning and retros and daily standups … it’s a massive time sink. And it serves no purpose because it’s individual work, not team work. Honestly, having to tell my PO every day what I am working on when he doesn’t even understand the task feels like extreme micromanagement.

But chevron being chevron, well, we like process, so there is no appetite to change and it’s the technical people who are wrong.

@1oeu not to burst your bubble, but none of what you just described is specific to SAFE. In fact, that stuff is baseline agile and backlog management. I have no problem with any of that.

It’s the pointless RTE meetings and PI planning and meaningless business value or effort metrics and flow and PI objectives and epics and all the other bullsh-t that SAFE layers on top of the features and user stories just to waste time providing some stupid metric for clueless leaders to look at

I hope we don’t get rid of SAFe: I have just spent a week crafting elaborate user stories and I’m very proud of my work. Acceptance criteria, descriptions, story points and relational links all captured in immense detail for at the behest of my scrum master and PO. I hope someone actually reads them this time.

Fortunately, actually completing the task was far less work than constructing the user story.

It doesn’t have to be a binary choice between going back to over engineered CPDEP or sticking with non-agile SAFE.

Get rid of all of them

@mtz You can love SAFe if you’re not in the agile chapter because knowing what’s in scope, goodbye scrum masters as RTEs. They’re expecting the delivery teams to self-scrum.

@qym+1w8EvxN1: I am with you. No idea what all these acronyms really mean besides being colossal time wasters and utter rubbish.

I too love SAFe, I enjoy meetings as I'm quite extroverted, and I enjoy having busy work to fill my day making me feel like I did good. I also live the chapter model as I can flit around different projects with plausible deniability, maybe I was useful, it's really hard to say.

Yeah let’s go back to CPDEP where we spent upwards of a year or more in Phases 1-3 doing a bunch of performative work rather than iterating collaboratively to deliver business value sooner rather than later. Let’s waste time creating elaborate DSPs that no one reads….yeah, let’s go back to that!

I like SAFe so I guess I am safe. It has not bothered me in the least. You guys move on, don't let the door hit you where the good lord split you.

@axz based on ENGINE postings listing experience with SAFe in the qualifications.

Unfortunately I’m very familiar with the framework.

Can someone tell me what is SAFe?

That’s probably the only jobs that will be left! 25% planned reduction, everyone in graduate schemes will likely be safe, most people on the tools and frontline engineering will be safe. The 25% comes out of what is left. Merry Christmas!

Based on what? A few digital product manager and product owner roles in ENGINE? You do know what SAFe actually is, right? Just because you have a product manager or a product owner, doesn’t mean you’re doing scaled agile…

If true then I am done with this place. Safe has destroyed me.