Why are there so many layers of management in IT? Seriously, we dont need 5 levels, it just adds bureacracy.
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Don’t need to outsource Scrum Master but that role shouldn’t be a full time gig despite what the Agilists say. Real tech companies have people rotate the SM hat among team members because it’s a borderline meeting coordinator. Could be delivering a lot more if we did similar.
Outsource scrum master? You obviously have zero idea. It’s an IT industry job role, EMIT didn’t make that up to kiss DW’s football loving a55. Look it up in Wikipedia our IT isn’t so backward, you still have access to that
since we love outsourcing so much, why don’t we outsource the entire company? Our all important shareholders including DW himself, manages the vendors and pocket the dividends.
What is a Scrum Master and why does an oil company need such a person as an employee rather than outsourcing that need?
There seem to be a lot more announcements about Scrum Masters than Reservoir Engineers.
Have you seen the Permian org chart? There are literally 4 people on each side that all do the same job in the management layer. I even heard one of them admit as such (he was near retirement and didn’t give a shyte).
@1dhh+1dqn84l6 the plan is 1200 IT employees in the US, there’s under 1500 now, plz math gooder
I have to love all those "advisors" (or some other bs title) doing business with themselves, adding zero value to the bottom line.
@vrm+1dqn84l6 I’ve been in EMIT for over 15 years and your comments about accountability are way off the mark. I do however agree there are many aspects of IT that non-IT people shouldn’t be making decisions around.
Seeing all those EMIT job titles on the announcements is entertaining.
Seeing those HR titles is almost as bad.
I see some of those stupid IT titles and wonder why we cannot succeed without that position or if we should outsource the IT stuff to a specialty company.
We are an oil company with a majority of IT employees.
Why are layers bad? As long as decision rights are well defined, the current structure isn’t that bad. a few years ago maybe around 2017 pre agile days, EMIT decided there were too many layers to VP and it was demotivating to young ambitious folks, compared to their peers in the business. They restructured to flatten the layers, remember those good times? I was then moved to a team where my direct supervisor had 30 employees and 10+ contractors reporting to him. I only spoke to him 4x a year, including 3 meetings for the performance and skills assessment. most of us in EMIT are individual contributors with CL 21-25. Fact is, the percentage of emit folks with high CL is much lower than business. there isn’t enough higher CL supervisors who understand the tech work to clear impediments or value add. Also more senior folks end up in the same CL as their sup if you flatten layers, because no one wants their CL would be forever capped at 25.
I see two reasons 1) Managers have too many people so they create another layer to reduce their reports 2) We have too many advisory roles which leads to managers having too many people
Bonus: When the problem is further down in the org, there are other people that can be blamed.
I’ve never seen anything like this. No produced results. HCL is a joke. I just don’t think they know how to manage people or themselves any more. Very backwards .
After 30 years in EMIT I have no idea what most people I see on the org chart do. What the heck are change managers and architects and advisors doing? Oh I know....generating email.......and PowerPoint. Definitely not building or fixing things.....
@vrm+1dqn84l6 “give IT the power?” You need credibility first, of which there is precious little. This lack of credibility is due to the horrible culture of the corporation centered around zero accountability, decades of popularity contest employee ranking, and management’s arrogance that they can’t possibly have identified the wrong hi-pos to groom 2 years into their careers. Not getting anywhere with IT is just another symptom of the rot that goes all the way into the company’s core.
If the business won’t give IT the power to do anything and forces us to do meaningless PoCs like the dog, then sure outsource it. But if you want to be a better company give IT control of itself and you’ll see huge improvements. Give us a VP who comes from IT or give us something better than just a VP (like every other company on the planet).
As for why IT has fat, it’s some management but that’s for accountability and legal purposes. For every area if you have a cyber attack you can be held legally and financially responsible personally depending on your level. So spreading that out makes sense because having one person accountable for all isn’t going to let them take appropriate risk levels to go fast where we should go fast. A lot of the fat though comes from supporting so many tiny applications and having people who know the legacy stuff and we pay full time to support something for 25% time. If the business had less customization and more COTS then you’d have significantly less fat both from managers and from technical.
Sour grapes, I enjoy being favored, and eating cake, it shows on my pay, won’t be outsourcing us anytime soon, plenty of other “core” groups that are a company drag frankly to outsource to Asia long before us.
Out source it. IT is non core.
It all boils down to the talent management system and decades of managers gaming it to put their favorites into various fabricated positions.