Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

Agile is run by contractors. All these reorgs and optimisations always end up better for consultants than employees.

Because the name sounds good. They like thinking that the company is "agile". They'll keep it until something with a better-sounding name comes along.

Our IT GMs really think that ImagineIT ran so smoothly and hit its mark that putting the same guy who ran that show to lead agile acceleration is going to fix things. We did not hit the cost targets, and now it's a smart thing to bring in more consultants to fix agile. Chevron is saved by the oil prices again. Drain the F'ing swamp!

I give agile another two years. By then everyone will know all the lingo and have realized it was all a big mistake: adding a huge number of useless layers of project micro management. Expect the mantra to return to flatter and simpler, never admitting that agile was the opposite.

How long will this agile fad remain at chevron?

Agile is just like Lean Sigma was a decade or so ago, and 'facilitated meetings' before that. Clueless management buys into some trendy consultant sales pitch that 'every other company is doing', tries to convert current staff into being experts at it, never really understands how to do it, never does any look-backs, and keeps plugging away at it until either the trend promoter moves on, or something else bright and shiny appears.

We use Agile so management can abscond their responsibility and accountability by pushing it down to lower rank employees. Delivering only minimum viable (value) products that don’t meet business requirements and projects are subject to grooming activities which contribute to never achieving business objectives timely. Scrum masters and RTEs create extra work and meetings to keep themselves and everyone with busy work. I thought CPDEP was process heavy but at least there were phase gates for the Decision Executive to make decisions and to hold project teams accountable for deliverables. There is no accountability the way Agile is being applied on IT projects

CPdep led us to paralysis and over budget, overbuilt projects! Agile is meant to steer us away from the behemoth projects. Unfortunately IT had not really gotten the picture with SAFE. But it’s not about the agile process being wrong. It’s that leaders haven’t been trained to change their expectations about the how the work gets done

I am in the Agile chapter, and things will not improve under new leadership. The guy only manages up and pretends to that he listens to feedback from everyone while saying things that you want to hear. No hard decisions will be made and it’s only about himself. Personal experience from past roles.

Agile “acceleration” team full of high PSGs are formed because he will rely on other people to get anything done. The problem is that it’s a swamp of people just st-----g each other’s egos. I don’t see any software engineering or cyber engineering “acceleration” team being formed despite the company not having great software engineers who stay. They just deal with what they have, and have less bloat, and perhaps where they failed is that their leaders are not smooth talkers like our worthless Agile leaders

Micromanaging little steps is EXACTLY what’s happening with this ADO story writing and backlog grooming. Because useless scrum masters want to know everything and we translate everything to them. The business analyst role should’ve been kept, but Agile got rid of them in place of these useless scrum masters. I’ve seen many of them just act as meeting schedulers and facilitators of meetings while staying quiet the entire time. It’s really an overhead we do not need. In many cases, the RTEs are also pretty pointless when it’s a “train” of extremely random groups, and the RTE should really just be a small team manager, rather than some certified Agile mediocre employee who has never managed anything other than his own calendar.

I think CPDEP was a much better process, because it focused on advancing toward key decision gates rather than micro management of each little step. In some cases there were issues with silos under CODEP, but I don’t see that improving under agile, and if anything the management turf wars seem likely to multiply over time.

I really think we should go back to using CPDEP … said no one

Agile is a perfect way to get look like you are going to get something done when you have no idea how or what you are doing.

So that the laid off workers with better jobs now who troll this site can laugh at you? LMAO!

Agile is garbage and those so call Scrum master are a pain in the a$$...same goes with Kanbahn.. all garbage. This is all a waist of time...meetings after meetings after meetings for what? blind leading a blind and people providing garbage status in their ADO stories. Ki-l it and lets get everyone back to being productive.

trying to stay woke
should try applying Agile to mgmt team
minimum viable personnel to take over mgmt team. cheaper

Yeah it works for Facebook cause they can just roll back the version. In some areas we can do that too. But we are also told zero safety incidents, which means u cannot do Agile. Of course the real reason is we hire consultants who really “know what they are doing”. Then you get this conga line of people who want to be on the team as it is a guaranteed management win.

Lost cause, save your breath, not worth venting.

So your suggesting minimum viable product does not work so well for things that can collapse, implode or blow up … who would have guessed? A lesson learned for the next sprint?

We should agile Well Control, deep water Drill Wells, refinery turn around, oil and gas trades.

Agile only works when the consequence of failure is to revert back to what you used before.

Agile is a joke. We roll out tech a agile and it doesn’t work. Still can’t input my time on workday. Workday also didn’t pull over any of the other data it was suppose to from pmp and go400 and etc

When it comes to the actual oil and gas projects we don’t do agile either. Will not on purpose. Guess they kind of did agile on Gorgon. They had to go back and do it the right way after it failed. Same will happen with the next big project.

@zls+1eS06b0Z No....he's still at the top.

Same reason as always…the right person at the right level threw their weight behind it, and no one wants to tell them it’s an inappropriate application and/or not working.

Meanwhile, the manager has probably moved on to another role and could care less if it’s in place.

Chevron does "Scaled Agile Framework", which is a methodology that a consultant group came up with to try and extrapolate the benefits of (and sell) "Agile" to very large companies like Chevron.

Some would say this is trying to fit a square peg in a round ho-e. SAFe introduces all kinds of additional roles, processes, dependencies, meetings and hierarchies into what is otherwise supposed to be a flat and simplified operating model that gives full autonomy to a product development team.

You could make the argument that the reason results are not meeting expectations is that we are still trying to figure out (and get good at) executing a version of Agile that has things baked into it that work in opposition to the value propositions of Agile.

MW thinks if we do agile, our stock price will get lifted like a tech company
Back in the day, we used to do lean sigma thinking out stock will get lifted like GE...but we dumped lean sigma once GE stock went in the pits

Simple. They think what they’re doing works.. Why do they think that? Because they don’t evaluate results.

Chevron doesn't actually "do agile". Look at the initial agile manifesto and Chevron literally does the complete opposite.