Apparently Imagine IT, Transformation or Project Alpha (those are the previous reorg names I remember) didn't work. What should be done differently? Want to hear from IT customers about projects on which you collaborated.
31 replies (most recent on top)
@fk+1jptxrz5e
You say the SWE's in ITFP are more qualified than the rest of IT and CVX is gutting ITFP in this reorg. Several of the US ITFP teams are being moved to the Engine and others are being staffed out of Manila and BA. The SWE's will be few and far between in ITFP after the June reorg.
ChevrIN will do IT differently and save lots of money.
From my experience, the seasoned SWE’s are in ITFP. Outside of that, there are ALOT of senior people who are labeled SWE, DE, & App developers who are extremely incompetent. It’s a lot of people who have survived a reorganization/layoff and have moved horizontally to a new role they have no business being in or care for. They’re just here to push the needle on their 401k, pension, & whatever else. It’s these folks who are dragging out work and raising the cost to get something out to production.
Even worse, most are lousy mentors and it’s the blind leading the blind. That has a huge effect on the development of these new hires. And just to finish the rant, Why does it take business days to get a response on teams when you literally work from your computer all day.
One thing that needs to be implemented is to reduce the upper and middle management layers by 30 to 40% because they do not have growth mindsets and they have all been scratching each others backs for the past 20 years. I have noticed several are retiring and others are leaving the company. Many are so fixed in their thinking process they can not create new ways to succeed. Most of them are still managing with the old silo mindset of the business gets what we deliver because they are the IT experts.
Chevron is moving forward with technology and many of the managers are not knowledgeable enough to implement new ideas. The manager that are capable are held back by the managers above them that do not have an innovative thinking mindset.
Surprisingly, the ELT hired LC as the new CIO and he is as bad as the current IT leaders we have. LC will be here to gut the USA workforce as Chevron brings in the Indian management team to drive cost reductions and change the mindset into a sweat shop of IT productivity.
@as+1jptxrz5e facts!
I'm going to give our fresh ML engineer grads a bit of grace.... there is rarely a senior IT leader mentor who truly know how to solve real problems using tools in IT - because most are power pointers.. and that's really what it is all about - to be a problem solver
@cc+1jptxrz5e That, unfortunately, is a symptom of platform leaders, PLMs and POs being horribly disconnected from the BU leaders. I don’t think people are advocating for asking everyone in a BU, the rank and file, for what they want. They need to be connected with the middle managers in the business.. to be able to drive those down to the teams. and we’re not. Because your PO is likely a business function loser
@b6+1jptxrz5e and if you look at their so called "architecture" diagrams - it cannot even be mapped into a truly useful working design or code... it is too "high level" because they don't know how to really design a working solution
@am especially the ot people that sit around and play with robot dogs and vr goggles all day and hide at the canon office
Everybody in here saying “give the business what they want” as if the BUs even know what they want. Talk to 5 people in the same BU and they’ll tell you they want 3 different things. Multiply that by 8 BUs and you see why the messaging this time is standardization. BUs are gonna hate it
This thread is SO D-Mb
Clearly the thing IT can do differently is to ki-l SAFe completely. It is an incredible waste of time. The biggest scam in the history of project management and consulting
ML engineers are fresh grads with CS/DS degrees because AG didn’t allow them to hire experienced external hires, and all of it had to be built from the ground up since 2019 or so. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad though. The real software engineers of the company are also all horizons people. The senior ones are “architects” who just draw diagrams and never written a line of code.
Yea sounds like fake news. Bro went at the part of IT that actually has modern skills and equipped to do the work required of them
@ay+1jptxrz5e And what platform are you working on? Because the ML engineers I work with are EXCELLENT…. Maybe you don’t know what MLEs are supposed to be doing. They were hired before copilot existed.. and I don’t know anybody in DSA actually using m365 copilot for code.
I had to work with IT and I haven’t met a single ML engineer that knows how ML actually works. Mostly fresh grads that regurgitate info from copilot.
This is half of IT actually... many are leaching with the technical folks that get sh*t done.. this include many IT architects that are nothing more than coordinators looking at SNOW to rationalize apps with literally zero though technical leadership
Nothing will change until someone has enough backbone to stand up to the groups in IT That don’t do anything but add paperwork.
Jack Welch and Steve Jobs said it well... If you hire B players, they will get C players.... then eventually the A players starts leaving... sooner or later, most is just a bozo....
honestly, IT needs this 40%+ cut...
@as+1 it all makes so much sense now…
My PO is f’ing terrible. And he’s always complaining about how he didn’t want this job and was supposed to be some team lead or manager in the BU.
IT is "chevronized" WAY TOO MUCH. It feels as it is captured in an endless useless circle.
Here’s the dirty little secret after ImagineIT:
The “business people” that other functions put into digital platform roles are actually the losers that those functions have cast aside as not important. So when you have the combo of 1) losers from the business who don’t really represent the business and 2) IT people who don’t know the business, then you end up with the garbage that is digital platform delivery. Bunch of useless product lines delivering jack sh!t that no one wants
I learnt a long time ago, the ones who want to give the business what they want are treated like village id--ts. Those with big pie in the sky grandiose ideas and apps that no one wants are rewarded. It's a lost cause.
Only thing that should matter is giving the business exactly what they want and need. No pushback, no bs, just do it.
@ak+1jptxrz5e
Exactly
@ae+1jptxrz5e
You assume everyone in IT work on the business side. Not the case, OT has a ton of IT and trust me, they know how the money is made
Nothing will change until someone has enough backbone to stand up to the groups in IT That don’t do anything but add paperwork. The good guys in IT get sc--wed by the useless ones. Until mgmt calls them out we are toast forever
@a9+1, these things happen every 4-5 years across the whole company. It doesn’t matter who your IT leaders are. It starts at the top with the CEOs.
From a purely business perspective, it happens every 4-5 years, and yet Chevron is hitting record production, record profits, so the BOD would argue that this is not sustainable. It’s just business. There is a thick layer of fat to be trimmed, and whether it’s Project Alpha, RAE/ESP, ImagineIT, or this time around, the fat is never trimmed enough. And again, despite what leaders are messaging as Chevron not being competitive or falling further behind - the reality is that the company continues to make A TON of money with fewer people.
Don’t let CS lead the reorg team again and again. He kinda f’d it up last time.
Maybe get a CIO who isn’t so enamored with data engineering, data management, and Google. And ask him to learn the business instead.
@a9+1jptxrz5e
Sure, the GMs could be better. But as a cross-functional person sitting in IT, and having to sit through your PI planning and the various sprint reviews, NO, most of IT people do not know the business. “How Chevron makes money” at a high level is oil and gas 101. The people who actually need or want the digital support are not being supported appropriately. People building data products and digital solutions have no clue what the workflows are like in the business units. And your BUDM’s program management team and IT advisors really do not know, especially in North America.
The IT people I find to be the most in-tune with the business are people in Australia and some international business units because they don’t move around much, and there’s only that business to learn. The rest of the legacy ITC people - good god, they might as well be working for a bank.
Its the leadership. How many times is this gonna happen before its realized these bad decisions are made at the top two levels?
Its time to replace the generals or this will continue to happen every 4/5 years. Its not sustainable.
And yes trust me most of IT knows what business Chevron is in and its NOT the IT business. But what you have to understand, if the business is going to use IT components then we are obligated to use them securely.
Now for some of the apps that are forced down? Yes. I agree
Just like petroleum engineers need to stop building stupid @ss power apps and python notebook “apps”, maybe the IT people need to actually understand how Chevron makes money.
Stop building stuff that nobody wants to use because we’re asking for scissors, and IT gives us a glue stick.