The moral of this story is that the BAC leadership is not d-mb, but they did miscalculated some things. And the other moral is that things aren't always as they seem.
It is no secret that Agile when you have regulators up your ar-e ceases to become Agile. The spirit of fail early doesn't compute with regulators. Similarly, this "all in" strategy seemed to stop when it came to handing out the precious budgets...so how all in was it?
The meat of the strategy was to align everyone's titles and roles in GTO to execution of technology so it could be capitalized for tax purposes. After all, how else was Cathy going to make good on her promised returns to BM? When you look at the role placecard, about 80% of those roles align to the creation of software and thus, make you a capitalized expense.
So when you think of it from that angle, the highest powers that be wanted a strategy that would allow maximum capitalization of tech headcount, "Agile" and its implementation plan starts to add up. However, morale dipped....execution was still strong because the tech teams found a way.....but generally wasn't Agile. There never was an interest to be like Google or Facebook....except for the healthy bottom lines.
With our CFO changing, expect a change in this strategy slightly. But overall, I don't see morale improving for the longest time. Aditya won't improve things, in fact I expect things to get worse in the interim.