As I get longer in the tooth I have seen my share of great new paradigm shifts trumped in often enough but find most significant advances happen incrementally by gradually optimizing the current organization and operations. I worry about this big reorganization driven by a few from the top with it out seem very little direct input and buy in from all the leaders and technical experts that find oil for a living. Microsoft’s agile, trans becoming projects, and machine learning accelerating workflows (et al.) might be a huge revolution or it might all be a huge distraction from getting the real work done. Your call.
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You know what agile is: having smart, experienced, highly skilled professionals and business people in a company and empowering them to make decisions. Quickly and efficiently. And then get this novel idea, "HOLDING THEM FULLY ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE RESULTS". Instead we have bloated processes, group think, decisions by committee, then kick up to the LT, then back down for a learning team, then a survey, then hire a consultant to gauge our results against industry practices.... a huge mess. Trust your people and make people pay a price for f'ups, you fail it costs YOU. You are replaced with the quickness. Your continued employment and position within the ranks should be determined by results, period. From the CEO to an OA. Get your job done well or so sorry to inform you but you may seek employment elsewhere. That is agile.
The rush to Agile is more bs. The agile approach is a software design mgmt method from the late-80s/early 90s. Consultants like BCG etc have just repackaged the notion and sold it to companies like CVX. The approach was never designed for oil exploration, asset development, or MCPs. But talk to a consultant and you hear agile is the solution to everything. Except for LT, who are rewarded for implementation, it is just one more obstacle for staff to navigate. Betting there are a few supervisors who also find it a complete waste of time and resources.
2ywk: I am sure that you are mistaken, agile must be great, just look how successful each and every Windows update has been. I am sure the rush it out and fix it latter approach will work great in the oil and gas industry. Saddle up folks, worry about getting a horse later.
My own personal experience with agile type methods is as follows:
The employees are forced into these scrums and pushed very hard to get deliverables out the door. There is lots of stress too many meetings, mistakes are made rushing to get stuff done in time There is very little if any thought given to solving the big problems first, they kick that can down the road and concentrate on the low lying fruit. Once the project gets going the management goes all "ga ga" about the result being 4 times faster than the old Top down approach. This bottom up methodology is ALL agile is really. I have seen it fail before over and over. What happens and will happen is that because a full design was never done, the difficult issues that were never addressed don't get solved. Management will NEVER admit to this. the project then gets seriously compromised. And of course the managers have already moved on to their next pending disaster. Of course everything is just great, we get "Learnins", please give me break. They haven't learnt a damn thing ! leaving behind a trail of destruction in their wake and/or a try to distance them selves from it all while get promoted. Mean while those of us who have seen this all before toll our eyes and wink tragically at one another. Poor Chevron. Now you understand why so many people are putting their hands up.
We work in a complex and dangerous industry. Chevron is prioritizing identity over competency. It's a dangerous trend.
It’s a huge distraction. I am in D&C we are being driven by this technology push to do projects that are not ready to be done. The people and system can’t even give you the data that you need to do the project but because somebody Highup has it on there PMP because their boss had it on their PMP. You now I have to do it even without the data, when you explain that all the information is garbage it falls on deaf ears. This is all about the factory model they want everything to run without engineers. But we do not make the same drill well every time all of our refineries are not the exact same.
They will purge a lot of the technical staff over the coming years, within five years we will have some major events happen big disasters. The company will then recognize that they need the technical stuff back and I will go and search for them, this is happened in the past this has happened in our industry it will probably happen again. The problem with this is the technical staff people is shrinking as they believe to can write everything down in a standard and not really know what the heck it even means.