I retired a few years back just as the Chevron Way was transforming into the new Agile Way. Is everyone now working faster and more productively than ever before? My impression of the whole transformation was that it was a useless waste of time, particularly following all the disruption caused by the pandemic, driven by MBA types looking for gold stars despite knowing nothing about the oil industry. That said, as an old goat PetroTech now out to pasture I will be happy to learn if I was wrong. Can those still in the company report that Agile lived up to its promises?
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I used to call it Fragile to everyone I met , before retired in 2020, Seems like every prediction I voiced about it has come true . looking back now I know it has very little to do with the current process fad CVX uses. It is really the competance of the Staff who use it. We all know Chevron is a ultra safe, boring, behind the curve Corp. who hire employees with that same desciption. How can a company inovate effectively with such people. it can't and never will. Chevron is a "structure/process" company which tries to reduce risk by constantly over micro managing all its operations in an attempt to remove risk. "It is what it is" stop trying to change it into something its not , go with the flow and stop being unhappy, if you don't like it leave. Chevron will be in business as long as this model fits the market its in.
show us all on the doll where popcorn touched you. that will help with your pain
zurh: Popcorn! You still hanging around? How’s that annuity working out for you?
Remember the person who lived on this site forever, had no life and posted out of mommie's basement and would call everyone "butthurt loser" all the time? I call that guy the "butthurt loser dude". We need more posters like that, indeed! And the deadwood guy. I think the butthurt loser was offended that everyone referred to him as deadwood that needed to be cut, ha ha
I completely agree. Everyone should have a great life such as those who spend all of their time wasting away on a layoff's board with no knowledge of how to navigate the rest of the internet or the outside world either.
yyjo: You the same guy who posts on every thread “What does this have to do with layoffs?” … like someone appointed a butthurt loser like you to be the site police. You were a poor performer who got laid off years ago… it is time to stop drinking in your darkened room and put your soaks back on. Good grief fella! Get a life!
You retired a few years back and have so many friends and such an interesting life that you troll the layoff threads to find out through some back-door rejects grapevine how your company is doing since you left?
I don't know what the point of an agile program or portfolio manager is versus a release train engineer. if any of those are doing their jobs correctly, the others are completely unnecessary. agile is the ultimate fat of chevron IT.
Leading Performance will replace Agile soon than SM and RTE job will be eliminated.
The biggest problem in implementing Agile in Chevron is lack of Product Management skills. In Agile, PO should have business analysis skills but in Chevron most POs lacks basic product management skills so we have to rely on Scrum Masters to translate the requirements to dev team. I've heard that most Agile roles will be slashed in 2024 as they are moving back from Agile to waterfall.
ROM is coming
My RTE wants everyone to provide daily updates to our tasks in ADO. She clearly has too much time on her hands. I would like to see her estimate how many hours she wastes with non-value adding work each day. Instead of making technical team members estimate hours spent on each task each day, it would make a whole lot more sense to see scrum masters and RTEs provide the same visibility for what they do each day. I am sure it will be eye-opening.
Wait.....Agile is the new savior.....right......right? CVX can sc--w up any process. CPDEP was fine if it were applied correctly. CVX screwed it up.
At it's core; Agile is a superb methodology. Cross-functional teams, product owner as a value champion and scrum master the servant leader championing transparency, courage and focus. What I went thru was horrendous : 1. One gets' pulled into multiple Agile teams; going through ceremonies daily with little time for much work. 2. Scrum masters with skills become new project managers, dictating work asking for status. 3. Backlog refinement is a joke, as everything is important at the same time. 4. Stories become work item; instead of real stories. 5. People asking for stories when you ask for help behavior spawn by management measurement. Stories are the new ITSM tickets. 6. ITSM tickets didn't go away but remain. 7. Customers are confused; create stories, incidents, change requests, create what? Contact scrum master, contact product owner, contact RTE, escalate to chapter head. What; How; Who?
a fairly senior IT leader in engineering said in a horizons or xyz event that we should embrace the agile folks in the company because there are so many of them, and when a big downturn inevitably comes through the industry again, this is the group that will serve as that buffer for the rest of us. the amazing waste and overhead will be the most obvious area to cut. so let's all be nice to our agile friends. they will take one for the team when it comes time to shed some fat.
@2cex Kodak actually developed first digital cameras in the industry. 10 years before anyone else did. However leadership at the moment predicted (through management consultants) what will happen if they introduced it. So for old business they sacrificed the new and much bigger business streams. They kept it under the wraps. Rest is history. There are some similarities here and few lessons to learn. But when you are sitting on a big pile of cash, and retirement is knocking, why bother?
@1wqj: "...CVX would be Kodak by now, all that is saving it is oil..." Yes, but some differences: 1) Kodak's bread-and-butter, film and film developing, faded away quickly (within at most 10 years) once digital cameras were introduced in the 1990's. In the worst case scenario, petrochemicals will keep Chevron around in the oil business for at least another 20 years, probably longer. 2) Kodak was either oblivious to this trend, or stubbornly refused to see it as their doom. With these in mind, Chevron has time to transition to equally profitable alternatives, the biggest roadblock is that neither Chevron nor the industry can pinpoint those alternatives right now, and hence are tip-toeing with only token investments outside oil (more virtue signaling than actual change). There's a very good chance that the profitable alternatives will be identified, developed, and exploited by companies that don't even exist at the moment.
I never understood why people who were not hipots stayed at Chevron more than ten years. You can write your own ticket at another company for more pay. Why stay?
@1aop: "...Once someone realizes (what actually gets you promoted) they will put a lot more effort into the office politics rather than actual work..." Yes, indeed. MW's Chevron. We hire very smart people. They reach a fork in the road of their careers, and then either 1) Start regurgitating all the catch phrases, and become 'process managers' or 'change managers', or 'digital gurus', or 2) come to their senses and jump to another company where they can continue to cultivate their technical careers. If you've been with Chevron more than 5 years or so, I guarantee you know people of both types.
Catch phrases and greed do not make for a successful company. CVX would be Kodak by now, all that is saving it is oil. This and it’s woke culture will be it’s downfall.
This board has been amazing in helping me realize that I’m not crazy thinking Chevron doesn’t know what it’s doing…
How can we expect to be a “powerhouse of IT talent” (saw this on some stupid slides) if we hire and retain based on behaviors and not actual performance and skills? What’s sad is some of my peers who are really intelligent see right through it and say the same things people on this board are saying. But they will never say anything out loud. They will nod and follow the we lead, agile and whatever other nonsense… Because they have also figured out how this game is played and what actually gets you promoted. Once someone realizes that they will put a lot more effort into the office politics rather than actual work. People around also notice and follow this trend. And on and on it goes…
agile or cpdep or anything you want to put in. they work if the leaders are worth their pay. AG letting agile go rampant and promoting all these useless people who cannot get jobs outside chevron. It starts at the top. Chevron IT has always been wasteful, but this disease is now spreading to other functions, and it's just sad. Sitting in meetings all day and calling things agile is what we have become.
agile is great because it created the new scape goat.... the product owner. blame the product owner for non delivery when you understaff them, put resources on the team with zero skills or worse with no desire and then have 10 people standing around yelling at them about why didnt x make the priority list, why architecture wasnt involved (there isnt any), did you meet your velocity (yeah thanks RTE who doesnt know what the heck we are even doing but here go inspect and adapt), did you consult ops on the supportability? (the same people who cant figure out their elbow from their @$$) and oh by the way, get it done quickly but be agile on changing requirements. Work to your capacity but we wont staff your open positions either.
OP, I'm in the same boat. You can't imagine (and the young ones can only dream about) how lucky we were that we got out when we did. Good pensions and a big severance package. We left a company MW was only starting to erode. Chevron is a company now with inexperienced "managers" (or 'chapter leads' or whatever cutesy term they have now) running the shop, and no clear forward strategy at the top, other than don't reduce the dividend. Eventually the legacy production is going to start dropping fast, and that will be the end of Chevron.
Agile is just Chevron's latest incarnation of The Music Man (look that one up). Lots of "consultants" sell Chevron on some new-fangled scheme that (fill-in-the-blank) is using with wild success. Chevron HR, failed-engineer types, and high-pots jump on the bandwagon, become "experts", promote the scheme in the company, then either get promoted or move on to the next craze. Remember when Lean Sigma / Six Sigma was going to "revolutionize" American industry? Kaizen? Chevron history is littered with these business fads, which usually lose steam in 2 or 3 years or when the next fad takes hold.
CPDEP wasn't the problem. It was people hiding behind it and creating bureaucracy and complexity rather than using it as a tool and rightsizing for the decisions that needed to be made. Hero's were made by having people being rewarded for finding a way to stop opportunities progressing rather than focussing on how to make them profitable. As someone said. "Exxon used there project tools to define projects and Chevron people used CPDEP to define themselves". However I have to say Agile must be a better process as we are no longer doing any projects.
You are way behind on Agile. It is used in every single industry, not just tech. Banking. Medicine. Construction. You name it. Probably the biggest single process innovation in a generation. It works. I use it at home even.
Yes, CPDEP was overused, lots of meaningless reviews and phase gates. Agile (which was meant for the tech industry, not oil) sounded like the "perfect" solution for slow and plodding CPDEP. Instead, all it does is maximize micromanagement by introducing a meeting to review every minute aspect of a project. In that sense, Agile is the "mini-me" of CPDEP.
Agile is a HUGE improvement over CPDEP which was being over-used on every project no matter how small. CPDEP complaints were the biggest every year on the survey. Anything was better. Agile is the perfect solution as it is a business standard globally and works on almost anything. I'm so glad we have it!
The only job higher managers have is to come up with a different idea and implement it regardless if it succeeds or not. As long as they can bring a new idea and change organization structure and functional day to day operation in a different way they are rewarded and valued, that is why you see these changes every few years with no real meaningful results in most cases. It is the hunger game the execs play for higher power and they all know it that d-mb working bees will follow regardless!
It did nothing for productivity at large. I’m sure it worked in some cases, but overall- nooo! How can you be productive when you’re stuck in meetings all day and have managers that have no clue? I’ve never seen a company waste so much time and money on concepts, talent cards, performance processes, endless meetings and made up roles. Agile at Chevron is anything but agile.