I am fairly new to US Bank with less than a year employment. I’m curious to know what are some of the worst decisions the company has made that you feel have been detrimental to its growth or sustainability? And do you think the currently implemented changes will make a difference for the downward spiral we are currently in?
13 replies (most recent on top)
"Agile methods in a toxic environment did nothing but create worthless daily ceremonies and MORE messy documentation impossible to wade through. "
Moving to Agile was a disaster. Improved nothing and really slowed delivery. The Bank is all over Agile though, 20 years after it was invented. What a huge waste of money and time. On to the next bad idea by the management team that has never had a good idea!
The best solution for US Bank would be to terminate all middle managers in an effort to eliminate management levels. The levels exist so that upper management is separated, isolated, and disconnected from the issues of the day. Upper management doesn't want understand their environment or be responsible for delivery of anything. Plenty of people between them and the actual work to point fingers at. If the upper managers had daily engagement with frontline workers, were forced to make decisions, they would have no need for the useless middle managers. The bank would save millions by elimination of the trash middle managers.
Have to agree that Andy Cecere is the worst. Banking industry goes through the worst crisis in our lifetime and no mass layoffs under Richard Davis. Andy Cecere gets handed a company in amazing shape and the first thing he does is mass layoffs, and then makes it an annual thing. Unethical scumbag. And then he surrounded himself with McKinsey consultants that would sell their firstborn for an extra buck. Even shareholders should recognize this as a disaster. He's going to run this company into the ground and get paid $20M a year to do it.
Let me just begin with this one that unraveled the majority of employees lives and livelihoods. Andy Cecere. Gone are the days of Richard Davis. And gone with that is the company that gives a shot about their employees. You are just a number to be slashed to get to a bottom line.
It is not the lack of technology. I was laid off from TOS at the end of last year. It is a LOT of new technology coexisting with a lot of old technology in a disintegrated mess. Architecture of systems and integration is not taken seriously unless it is not a shiny new tool. People get paid per idea but there are a lot of bad ideas due to the pressure to deploy. Agile methods in a toxic environment did nothing but create worthless daily ceremonies and MORE messy documentation impossible to wade through. And yes, the company decided to go with offshore without much of a plan but to save money. All this is COSTING the bank dearly. Now managers are busy to keep their indian company offshore connections and the name of the game is to profit the offshores with constant new projects or rework. No one cares about the quality of the software much less the architecture of it. The place is a horrible intricate mess. I am glad I was done. I could have helped them but I was laid off. This fact that actually they are getting rid of technical architects is trying to fight a fire with gasoline.
Someone posted about "politics" and they are right–the core bank leaders are neglecting their business and focusing on their political activism. This will ruin the bank if it hasn't already.
A big mistake I see is the decision to bring in new managers who don't know the job. "You were good in leading that department" does NOT mean they will be good in a completely different department. Then it's like having a newly-elected mayor coming in and telling the fire department how to fight fires. They have all of the authority but none of the ability.
Big problem. Repeated problem.
To me, it's summed up with managers who don't listen to their people. There are good front-line people who work at US Bank who know their job and what needs to be done. But then some manager goes to a workshop or talks to a consultant and comes back with an "idea" that won't work. But they push forward with their idea anyway even when told by their people it's a bad idea.
Bad leadership.
They decided to bank like 1975 with tech from 1965 and a herarchich scheme of the 1930's. Poisoned well, decadent leadership. Destined to the toilet
The "One U.S. Bank" corporate mentality is absolutely destroying the bank's fee business lines which must compete with the myriad of non bank disruptors, nimble fintechs and emerging competitors which do not have to act, operate or report like a bank, because they aren't a bank and the nature of the fee business lines is not banking at all.
These are quality comments. TOS is a mess and has been a mess for a long time. TOS leaders and upper management simply do not have the needed talent to bring USB into a modern, integrated company. So few SMEs and the experts that are left are worked to death. Work/Life balance for technical experts is horrible. Multiple daily fires to fight. Of course they leave at their first opportunity. It took decades to create these experts. Middle management doesn't even care when they leave or why they have left. Plug another name into the spot and move on. Frontline workers are names on a spreadsheet to blame when issues occur. Their talents are never sincerely appreciated. Time for another re-org and RIF.
In the years leading up to the Financial Crisis of 2008, US Bank refrained from issuing risky mortgage loans while acquiring a number of smaller institutions, to become the 5th largest regional bank. In the fallout, many banks came available through some federal program and US Bank took them over. These other banks all had different technologies, databases & procedures so it was a nightmare trying to consolidate and standardize all of them. I think that was when TOS got lost. There were too many people with ideas about the way to move forward and it was a pivotal time for technological changes. Since then there have been too many reorgs to count. Then they moved the central operations center to Kansas and dismantled the in-house IT teams and hired vendors for IT services. The straw that seemed to break the camel's back was the Elavon merger. My guess is that the lure of off-shore accounts and the gravitas of international banking changed the nature of US Bank for the worse. Elavon managers were incorporated into TOS and USB FTE seemed to be "eliminated" systematically, Off shore developers and engineers have been hired to replace Americans at 1/4 the salary and If I were in your position, I would not look to USB for any long term career plans. Attempting to implement a dozen major enterprise initiatives all at once with new graduates expected to interact with the old guard, is a plan to fail. For all the money saved in salaries and hopes for fresh attitudes there is little chance for successful change in processes or procedures. Trouble tickets piling up and little progress to show for all the stand up meetings and other tools that are not taken seriously. Agile only works when everyone has adopted it and I don't think that it's possible in a large enterprise like USB. For years and years I asked for more information about technology initiatives but rather than being clear about what the plans were, we got meetings where they blathered on and on with jargon and unintelligible acronyms. I was more confused after these transparency disclosures than I was before. Bottom line, USB got too big, too fast. TOS was always scrambling to keep up with all the projects. The people who had the experience and knowledge were stretched beyond capacity year upon year. I don't know if they didn't share knowledge or if they simply never had time to get others up to speed. They have been retiring (escaping the insanity) or their positions have been eliminated systematically for the past decade. Replacements are foreign nationals with fresh internet training credentials and little or no experience. They don't understand the culture and barely speak/write English. Jump ship as soon as you can. Find a smaller organization and don't look back. Good luck!
I worked at plenty of large corporations that failed slowly. The worst decision by any company is maintaining an incumbent middle-management instead of an effective middle-management. The problem is the market environment is always disrupted by new paradigms and upstart competition excited with talent and their stock options. And all we have over here is Peter Principle middle management just looking for a retirement package.