Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

PI Planning made me revisit this post, it’s just really funny for me sitting through a final review and everyone doing their callout with a sea of people like PLM, PLTM, RTE, GA and such giving the most misguided input, then giving the impression like they know, haha just comedic. And oh my, then we have a confidence vote which is always a 4 or 5 and close the session as we have a rock solid plan haha and weeks later we revise it because business is fluid and because we are “agile” and add stories, which take almost as much time to write as doing the work itself haha so the PLM, PLTM, RTE and such can be kept in the loop and know the velocity haha and ask questions at the next final review haha.

Everyone don’t take all this too seriously, do your story get paid get out. This is pretty funny with the right mindset.

What’s the criteria for deleting posts?

Every time HR IT manager Pl, GM Eng AG, GM ITFP RS, GM Platform TK and Data GM MC are called out as awful managers and we hope they’re terminated, the post keeps getting deleted.

Why?

@czhu+1v49tNO6

Have you ever talked to her?

She is the epitome of unrelatable and unlikable.

Why do people have an issue with MC?

So HR Tech Manager JU designed this nightmare of a work process? So the question is, does anyone know if CIO LC also thinks this work process is a mess? Because if he doesn’t then it’s all moot point and we’re in for the same problems with a whole lot less people.

HR technical platform manager J.U was the architect behind this mess. He was the one interviewing folks alongside BCG in 2019 to get us ready for ImagineIT. He used to be an advisor to BB before the TCO guy (also a useless mo--n)

Never should have left dedicated teams managing the assets.

I think one of the main culprits of this entire disastrous product line, platform, chapter, wannabe agile model was this lady who retired right after it went live. My hazy memory recollects a email she sent as this being one of her proudest accomplishments, she was like an older white lady. It makes sense now why she jetted right after, she probably knew this might be either great or a total sh$t show, 50/50 gamble.

@2xaj, I can relate to absolutely everything you have said. I have been "PI Planning" for this day since ImagineIT. I'm tired of dealing with these d-mb Advisors from an IT background who think they know better than the business itself about what they need and I'm the used car salesman pushing their wares.

I’m part of the problem and I need to go in the coming layoffs. I used to take so much pride in my work, I truly enjoyed what I did and for the most parts, who I worked with, but after the transformation and after everything became a chore and having 10 different managers (subchapter, data architect, solution architect, product line architect, product owner, global advisors, random drop in from product line managers, release train engineer telling me how to do ADO, scrum masters, once in a blue moon appearance by a technical platform manager dropping direction) I half a$$ it all now. I don’t give a sh$t about planning sessions, I don’t care about velocity or burn down rates, I don’t give a$$ about giving feedback, I’ll say some fluff to pretend I care. I’ll try and do my little story, which I have no clue how it fits into the bigger puzzle because the global advisors or PO is a god damn tool and they themselves don’t know or do cr-p beyond write a story telling pleabs to figure it out and they then can talk about the millions they saved Chevron and if we can’t figure out for them, they’ve been given such absolute authority they dump people with absolute impunity.

I’m toxic now and I need to go, I just hope when layoffs happen and if I’m selected I get a severance.

Anyone who wanted to do some good and built real product has quit long time ago. When the system works against getting stuff done and building anything useful only paper pushers and resting & vesting crowd stays.

I’ve built Power BI dashboards and Power apps that are 10x better than the bulls**t IT managed systems and when I try to tell them why they act like they know my job better

We used to have a decent MCBU IT group to work with back before 2020 but now dealing with the platforms they’re 95% worthless.

I came from a fairly large corporation, not as large as Chevron but still pretty big, and the way our IT structured their stuff was to create a database that housed a bunch of information; financial, logistics, operational and so on and then each division had access to that source and had a small nimble team that would create tools on the fly.

The downside was that the reports weren’t centralized, or standardized but the upside was it’s what each division wanted and the turnaround was spitfire fast. There was no need for stakeholder (A) to talk to product line (b) that’s prioritized against a plethora of other competing business groups (c) that’s then also prioritized against other platforms (d) coordinated by this obscure central team (f) and peppered with endless meetings. It was just stakeholder (a) to technical colleague (b) directly to data source (c), the greasy fast response would make a greased pig jealous.

By doing this you could get rid of this logjam of a mess and completely get the b-ms rush to non value adding groups like product lines, platforms, global advisors and yaddy and reassign the good ones to the business unit itself.

Now, I know some technocrat could probably give a sweet eloquent quibble as to why this can’t work and defend till their dying breath this mess of a operations, but I assure you, this way of working ain’t the norm for majority of corps.

We’ll, anyways, ENGINE is here, and you can feel the rain and thunder in the bones that tell you it’s about to be lots of layoffs coming soon, this doesn’t feel like your typical ROMs from the past. If I were you, and you even remotely think your job is in jeopardy, I’d get your resume ready and start applying now, it’ll give you a year head start against your peers.

Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

Y'all are hating on advisors, it's not all off-sites and fanciful value estimates. Sometimes we need to chev-spin-splain why the chosen corporate program is going to deliver leading returns. No sir, the money hasn't been lit on fire (spent on third party consultation), that's stressful!

@rux, you make an astute observation. Our various POs and digital advisors are celebrating the huge amount of value delivered - yet I know for a fact that most of what we’ve built has crippling bugs that make it unusable, and the customer as a consequence has never really used it. Instead, they give up, get on with their jobs, and move on to the next thing. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

There was too much change all at once in 2020: the reorg, the move to agile, the move to the cloud, and the new operating model all happened at roughly the same time.

Someone mentioned Global Advisors in the comments and generally IT gets a lot of heat when it comes to layoffs, but the poster is absolutely correct that Global Advisors are of no value. I’ve been in Chevron for decades and I haven’t met one that added any value, they’re so disconnected from their customer base, and what boggles my mind how they spin all the value they’re creating and how management believes it. The thing is tools are just an enabler, Chevron has been making millions/billions before fancy tools and if the fancy tools went away we’d still be making millions and billions, what I don’t understand is how does a business identify a need, then a GA comes in and demands a tool be created (and poster is right that it’s usually implemented wrong) and claims how they saved the company millions, it seems like double dipping on the numbers. When I see a GA coming my way I cringe so hard because it’s just another talking mouth I need to appease to simply do a job that’s already stressful.

Cloud jobs are the first IT jobs going to ENGINE and are posted on the careers website. DF is (was?) a GM before transformation and is in charge of Cloud now. Would have thought the cloud jobs already went to MSP but I guess that failed too and no one wants to make the MSP accountable because that has worked out soooo well for us too.

Business Units pay the bills and therefore should have all the say. Give them their own dev teams.

platforms were the brainchild of a defunct Chevron IT Fellow who left the company to go work for an energy investment company.

The platforms was an attempt to centralize as much work as possible, since each BU having their own different systems was (and still is) expensive according to benchmark data. That part at least makes sense, in theory. It breaks down in practice because the platforms have limited ability to force change on the BUs, and are staffed with people who don’t understand what the BUs need to begin with.

The chapter model has been a trainwreck from the beginning. They should have abandoned it when they couldn’t find enough sub chapter heads and had to settle for a bunch of mediocre perfomers with nowhere else to go.

Who is the tool that convinced people of this nonsense? Give us initials and title.

The man who convinced everyone of the strategy and implemented this was sent to ITFP to make it work and is now leading the charge and the first teams to move IT to ENGINE. Why we allow failures to be repeated over and over and never remove the people who failed is whats truly hard to comprehend.

I know there are hundreds of those less than graciously ejected in 2020 who are chuckling at this nonsense brought in by - who? The Microsoft guy, MIT wunderkind, glorified high-pots with MBAs, BCG, some other consulting group, who? The sad summary for Chevron is it's a managerial house of cards with no emphasis at all on technical capability or execution. Throw in a good dose of DEI, and you have the sorry state of Chevron today.

The op model in theory is sound in theory . However it was never implemented as designed. Most products don’t even have an actual dev team. Most POs aren’t committed or knowledgeable. It started out during the pandemic with almost 1000 less people than needed. The IT FLT still thinks in project terms and has never funded the transition to products. We still have the BUs demanding and bullying to do it their way and then saying it does work. They go out and spend millions on tools and then tell IT to make it work. The IT FLT launched it half baked because we don’t know when to accelerate and when to do it right.

@jnl+1v49tNO6

Ops probably didn’t mention “scrum masters, agile coaches, product line managers, digital advisors and digital translators” because of how off the radar they are or just useless.

If a work requires cross platform deliverables, it becomes a massive coordination nightmare. You have to navigate through those platforms to fine the right team to do the work. Get on their backlog and try to align priority and timeline. We have inter dependency but each platform has own priority list. Their priority may not align with your priority. It takes longer time to get things done.

If you are in wells you exactly described the new WCM tool

This post really strikes a chord with me.

I am what IT would call a business user, and let me tell you a dirty little secret, I, and many of us still use Excel to do a lot of our work instead of your tools. A lot of these tools IT has created simply don’t work, they provide the wrong data, and inflexible and trying to get it to work is not worth getting dragged into endless standups while still trying to meet our compressed daily and weekly deadlines. When we had an embedded technical person, we were able concoct things and move them out the door fast, now we have to work through a useless Global Advisor who has no clue what we do, and many times don’t even do what to ask, who then eventually pawns us to someone else, that then setups meetings with another person(s) who are usually from India then it’s a exercise in pain as we then again work through a useless GA, and usually wait as we have to wait some more as we get prioritized on another platform, wow a mouthful huh?

We can’t even speak our minds because optically we know how large a deal all these digital imperatives are, so we play the part, look excited, help you/us to check the box by saying you did a great job so we can all move on and say we saved the company millions in reality we probably wasted millions.

The man who built this is the technical platform manager for HR

I think the 'XLT', as you put it, knows how broken it all is.

I believe they have effectively given up on trying to fix it, and this upcoming round of layoffs and ENGINE is the nuclear option.

Burn it down and build it back up.

No, you haven’t missed anything. It’s the bizarre operating model I have ever encountered, and I’ve been trying to understand it daily since its inception.

But you’ve oversimplified it by omitting the scrum masters, agile coaches, product line managers, digital advisors and digital translators.

It’s not uncommon to have 5 times as many people in a meeting talking about what work should be done, and how it should be done, than people who actually do the work. And most of these people have no domain or technical knowledge to provide any meaningful guidance, let alone understand what the customer wants or what would genuinely deliver value.

So everyone just goes through the motions of pretending like they understand how it works well and why the model is sound. The whole thing has completely broken my spirit.