Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

“ minimum viable well” analysis is just a new dress on the same pig: A CHPDIP decision gate. It is no great achievement to just switch out new for old jargon. The question should be is the right path to that big decision incremental sprints or a careful deliberate aligning of all the complex parts with “time to do it right” before the final decision gate. The term “gate” correctly highlights you walk through (or not) rather than re-deciding after the threshold. I guess we will not know if Agile leads to better decisions for a decade or more, but I suspect by then a whole new management system will be forced down on those of us just trying to get the job done day to day.

Most of our chipDip projects were failures so a new approach was required. The minimum viable well is actually a smart idea.

I came to Chevron a few decades ago as a petrotech SME with experience in several other companies, and when I took CHPDIP training I was impressed by its focus on getting the work of different specialists and groups aligned for decision gates. This idea of doing incremental bull$hit in baby steps and having little celebrations that you did something could not be more off key. We don’t make little windows menus that can be continuously tweaked toward improvement when initial efforts were cr-p. Rather we risk big money when we say drill here and then when the rig is set we own it all the way to glory or bust. Can’t say oh gee golly I think I will just move that ho-e 10 miles north half way through the drill. Where did this agile cr-p come from and why didn’t folks that had actually worked big oil exploration and development projects stop it!

When Chevron announced that Agile would take the place of CHPDIP, I knew it was time to go elsewhere. The real joke was how senior management tried to tell us how they had used the Agile and how great it really was to project productivity. It was a farce. None of these people have had to run a real project, experiencing the difficulties of dealing with other team member's time constraints.

9abh: agile is slow and clumsy. Before you do any work explain it at a large meeting to get a detailed group think, continue to explain your progress almost every day so a load of champions, managers, facilitators can chart your progress step by step. After all those meetings and conflicting management suggestions time is up so just do some cr-p real fast and declare success. All the managers celebrate your success (you can come too if you like). Propose to do the exact same thing correctly (but call it something else) and explain this “new” task at a large meeting … repeat… repeat…retire…. Not that it matters as no one can find you files… new employee explains the same project to a large group of managers.

The opposite of Agile? That would be Slow & Clumsy.

“quoting Elon“, the world’s richest man (ok, currently second richest). He has lot to teach others about leadership (but yes also can be a complete jerk at times). Who is it that Chevron would have us look to for management examples? … the worlds poorest man for diversity inclusion? To each their own.

How is anybody quoting Elon? Lol

1. we don’t ACTUALLY practice agile at Chevron, we just talk like we do

2. it didn’t come from Microsoft. Many of their teams don’t even pretend to do “agile”

3. “Chevron agile” is an absolute joke and whoever brought SAFe to Chevron should be strung up by their toes on the bell tower in CHVPK before we leave the campus.

Chevron won't embrace this because it didn't come from some corporate consultant, nor was it blessed by Microsoft management.

"Use common sense"…wait, wait, wait… I think we need to appoint a committee to look into how everyone feels about this and report out in a town hall!

"Use common sense" - what a radical idea!

The leech you worship hasn’t done a single hour of hard manual labor his entire life. He didn’t even start Tesla or PayPal. But I’m sure most Musk worshippers also voted for the Orange ape. Very low IQ types.

I wish there were quantitative metrics of productivity before and after the transformation. I am willing to bet that real employee productivity went way down. Have we found any oil since the transformation began?

Ignoring the recent hate/love over Twitter, if you had told me a decade or two ago the richest man would make his fortune by starting a new car company and building rockets I would have laughed you out of the room. More to the point, what one does not do to make money is micromanage your people by the upward focused group thinking of every minor little task… as proscribed by agile!

Yes, all hail daddy Musk. Such an influential and smart leader… he clearly knows how to run a company. /s

I spend a few minutes every Monday morning reviewing my weekly calendar and removing low-value and/or useless meetings.

I find that I can usually free up 50% of my calendar or more. I’ve never seen a company waste so much time with useless meetings under the banner of information sharing by people trying to justify their own usefulness instead actually contributing to something adding value, like getting oil and gas out of the ground (that’s still our primary business believe it or not).

“Be clear, not clever” would leave a lot of people out of jobs…

90% of Chevron meetings with more than 5 people are simply information sharing sessions where nothing is debated, solved or decided. These could all be replaced with sending around a set of slides or a document with the information in it.

Next time, send all the information a week in advance. Then turn off the projector at the meeting and lead a discussion on what the information means and what decisions need to be made and actions taken next. Announce this to start of the meeting and request anyone who doesn't think they need to be involved in the decision to leave.