Thread regarding State Farm Insurance layoffs

"The problem here is that many of the business people brought over into ISD still act like business partners, instead of productive team-mates on a systems team. They sit there like judges holding a gavel ready to sit in judgement of the end product -- but if that's all they're going to do, they SHOULD have stayed over at Corporate. Systems projects need business analysis. These days, they do not receive it."

Precisely.

I had a ISD BA fight with me on the word on a letter going out to a customer. That particular word was an industry standard and going out to customers for the last 10 years. Now this ISD BA and few more to gang up on systems BA ( They did not know that it is industry standard) pulled managers for the tiny thing. The thing that should have been completed in a day took meettings after meetings. Ultimately left it for them to do whatever they want to do, and LO BEhold they did what i wanted them to do from the beginning.

Looking back i think i hurt their Puny EGO.

Anyways, Statefarm is a great company with good core business and good brand and I am sure after this pruning and clarity something good will come out.

On another note, I know many of us have our insurance policies with State Farm. If I were you, I'd drop them like a hot rock. Given the turmoil they are in, I have no faith in their willingness to accurately or fairly pay out a serious claim.

Wait until the deficit from the tax bill starts to be realized. The issue at SF will be much worse. Filtering cash up was tried before. And if SF goes public, this tax bill will be dividends for shareholders...not for employees.

I have worked at employer who has done the same crap as our farm. The company did a merger, then all hell broke loose My boss refused to fire anyone and lost his management role. His boss did the rof. It is too cut down on future pension payments. The stress was so much he had a heart attack. The management at our farm hires consultanting companies that are clueless and as one person mentioned want to unload bad software projects and have no vested interest in the success of the company. There are or were plenty of good employees. But the neposion at times was bad. Those folks should be shown the door. But the reverse is true. If you can relocate and get a good offer, go for it. As Trumps economy takes off , take off with it. Merger with whom. Allstate, geico, metlife ? When rusty was in charge, the changes you see would have never occurred

Vivify? Isn’t that another Pettit/ Dies cluster?

None of their projects have ever delivered a single thing. They mysteriously get shut down and intentionally forgotten about.

Well we wont be using architects because the random team gets to try and design something in the spaghetti of a mess with no road map, awarness across domains... hence just throw sh-- to production as fast as you can is the new montra.. I hope agents enjoy outages... we lived this a few years ago... lol

I doubt they are going to clean up anything. The way they are firing people is going to toss out the baby with the bath water. The only people left will be the ones too scared to jump. Those paper architects aren't going anywhere.

State Farm is about to become a huge cluster, beyond what it already was. And I think those paper architects are going to get even more powerful.

"Clearly, the goal is not to retain the best people. It's to reduce the headcount dramatically."

I really hope that's not truly happening. I hope the leadership use this opportunity to clean up all those sleepy managers/directors and those paper architects who have no clue what's going on on the grounds

Directors 27%. First line 21%. That gets them to where they wanted so no firings is my understanding.

I heard it was less than 25% and the powers that be had to have a special meeting to decide who to fire.

To add to that last post isn’t there children of both Tipsord and Farney working in Strategic Resources and at least one of them working in Dallas?

I am not sure why the media isn’t covering this story. They should be! They should be all over it! Tipsord was originally a Tax Attorney, what do you think his vision for the company is given the tax environment in IL?

How long can the local politicians and media ignore this? I noticed online that people have started calling out WGLT and the Pantagraph for not reporting the obvious.

The mood inside State Farm is at an all time low. Everyone is just waiting for the other shoe to drop. No one trusts the line they're being sold by Pettit and Fawad.

What exactly was said at the company-wide presentation? What's the mood like inside State Farm?

In agreement with the post below and am wondering why Pettit remains?

Glad I bounced when I had the chance.

Yeah, they apparently decided to waste everyone's time yesterday with a company-wide presentation that basically said, "No worries. Everything is awesome and we've made all great decisions." What a crock.

Well thats because vivify has shut up tighter then a steel drum for fear of any more fallout... So everyone just pits their rose glasses back on and forgets. The “state farm way”... Give it a few weeks when they decide to drop their next dirty bomb... This will light up again!

Quiet around here these days. All must be well in bubble town.

To add to the previous thoughts here, one of the biggest mistakes made with CDE/ICP involved ISD. I don't even know who's responsible: Systems? Business? Both?

The end result was that State Farm, as an organization, took business people from Corporate and dumped them into Corporate South without giving them any Systems training, and then they expected those business people to be able to participate in Systems processes. At the same time, the organization took all of our experienced business analysts and moved them into different roles, opening a huge black hole in requirements analysis.

To give you my perspective on the impact: Before CDE, I worked with extremely competent business analysts. They would produce extremely detailed requirements documents that helped me create the architecture and application design. If I uncovered a missing requirement, the BAs knew how to get answers fast -- they were experts at working directly with the business to figure out what they wanted. Our projects were almost always successful using this model, using any metric available to me as a Systems employee. We delivered the objectives in our charter on time, often under budget.

Unfortunately, CDE/ICP made a mess of everything. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I haven't seen good business requirements since our old BAs moved to other positions. I haven't worked with a single ISD BA who comes anywhere close to providing the level of analysis required. As a result, I am left trying to architect/design systems based upon little to no information.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have done complete projects with ZERO requirements. That is not normal, nor is it any way to foster success.

The problem here is that many of the business people brought over into ISD still act like business partners, instead of productive team-mates on a systems team. They sit there like judges holding a gavel ready to sit in judgement of the end product -- but if that's all they're going to do, they SHOULD have stayed over at Corporate. Systems projects need business analysis. These days, they do not receive it.

I suppose someone up top finally figured out that they made a huge mistake, but the damage is done. Our good BAs have either left or, in true State Farm fashion, moved on to roles where they have lost much of their edge.

What really blows my mind about all of this is that the business requirements process WORKED before CDE, and it worked EXTREMELY well, at least in the areas where I worked. There was no need for an overhaul.

Like much of CDE/ICP, leadership created a solution in search of a problem, and in the result, actually CREATED the problem.

All of this ties directly back to people like Pettit. Why is she still here?

Agree with your perspective... ICP, CDE or whatever you want to call it was the catalyst 100% to our current predicament.. In state farm tradition, rather then holding the leaders accountable for their mistakes, we promote them and cover them up!

I'd like to offer my perspective, which is somewhere between the perspectives offered in the last two posts. First, let me say I find A LOT of agreement with BOTH of those posts.

In short:

1) Yes, State Farm Systems is incredibly bloated and inefficient. (I've worked at other large companies where the budget for their entire systems department equaled roughly the budget for one large State Farm project, just to explain where I'm coming from.) And there is no question that the way Systems is now structured has far too many layers and far too much separation of duties, to the point that it takes 10 people to do the work of one. It's really a mess.

2) Yes, it's true that business seems to have very little idea of what's involved in Systems work or what we do. State Farm has a ton of data. Handling that data in a way that is SAFE, yet still provides the functionality desired by the business is very expensive, even if we were totally optimized for productivity. And this dilemma is made even worse when the business keeps hiring consulting firms to bring in vendor products that don't work because they have been sold snake oil by liars -- which is only possible because they are clueless and don't trust their Systems people, who try to warn them about this crap time and time again.

3) Yes, it's true that Systems has not delivered nearly enough for the last 6 years or so, but YES it's also true that the reason for this is directly tied to all the stupid decisions made with ICP.

4) The Systems department used to actually get things done -- before ICP. We still do get SOME things done, just not enough to justify our enormously bloated expenses.

5) And while Systems is in desperate need of an overhaul, the reasons for this do tie directly back to Pettit and the other leaders in Systems who completely FUBAR'd things with ICP.

@glad2beGone - non systems folks like to use the word IT never delivers... IT delivers a ton of stuff, only a non IT person would say that statement becaause they can not ever begine to comprehend the scope and scale of what we do.. For one the largest private network and data in the world 2nd to the Untied States Government... Most importantly IT has wanted to makr changes for years but Business will never allow us to sunset systems so we can focus on new and innovative, always ask us to deliver 110% on the first at bat vs what they really need to get the job done... And lastly and most detrimental no clear requirements... The ideas proposed by this IT transformation may hell but it will go no where so long as the Business is not willing to change ans accept modern IT solution practice.. I.E. you cant have your cake ans ear it too!!!

What is in the works is they are now scrambling because the new CEO is tired of funding an absurdly obese Systems dept. that has not delivered one damn thing. Think about it, how does he justify downsizing other dept like claims etc and continue to let Systems spend $ as if it grows on trees. Systems didn’t deliver anything to any of the business areas within SF. Even with THOUSANDS of e ter also you couldn’t deliver anything. Nothing short of pathetic. It’s not the Managers fault or even the AVP’s. It’s the VP’s fault and whomever mentioned Ashley Pettit you are exactly right. She is an awful leader with no marketable management knowledge and an absolute snake!

Your new leaders are going to follow the business fads.. they have not been in those roles in other companies. This is the height of their success because Tipsord needs a change and they were the only yahoo’s that could be convinced to come to Bloomington IL. They won’t be there long, they are all job hoppers and before the wheels come off their new plans They will make another job hop to retain their position levels. As for Ashley her husband has already retired parents are aging and she already has her retirement place in FL. She is stuck there until her parents are gone so she will stick around as long as she can and be Tipsords connection to the old Systems dept. Never forget folks she was solely responsible for both the budget and the # of workforce in Systems and both of those things ARE the problem!

The decisions made with ICP were so catastrophically stupid and wasteful... I don't recall ever talking to any technical person who thought ICP was a good idea -- and to be clear, I'm not referring to the notion of a customer-facing platform (which is fine in and of itself), but rather to the totally unnecessary business, systems, and technical overhaul that accompanied it.

There is no question in my mind that the decisions made with ICP made State Farm Systems far less productive. I sometimes wonder if the people up top continue to believe they made great decisions, or if they now understand they screwed up. Just how blinding is the cloud they live in?

Anyway, I think the goal NOW has nothing to do with productivity. It's all about cost reduction -- achieving some magical number on a balance sheet. Nothing is going to get done in Systems over the next year or so, as productivity is going to hit an all time low. But I don't think the guys up top care one iota, as I think their goal is related to something altogether different.

Are they selling the company? Planning to go public? There's something in the works here beyond what they are telling us.

What I find to be ironic is that our new “experts” in IT aka vivify have told us the way we do work s---s... Yet when they go to implement their nee ideas its half baked, not complete, un thought out and causing my productivity/loss of moral in the last 3 months then we have seen in 10 years time... How can you annouce 25% of you need to go, you get 45 days to tell us who will voluntary, yet have NO information to share about - who what how where when... its like chickena running around aimlessly with no direction other then “ well u need to be different with less people... but we dont know how we want to do it”... hey we made staff reductions, this will look good on paper.. Our nee IT Leaders are idiots... i wonder how they will feel when tipsord is no longer happy with them and throws them out like yesterday’s trash like they are to all the folks that have lived and breath state farm for their entire career.

Rule #1. Always take a buyout if offered. It almost never gets better for the employer afterward, at least not in the short- to medium-term. Who else is hiring anywhere close to State Farm? No offense, but most people at State Farm don't have any marketable and/or transferable skills outside of State Farm.

Wow. 33% Is higher than I was expecting. It's sad to think that SF is the type of place that would have that many folks bail given the chance. Granted, the options are "Leave and get a guarantee of xyz" or "don't leave and probably get canned without xyz" but still. A great working environment would likely see people stay to fight for a chance to remain with a top company.

I'm awaiting the announcement of what will happen to analysts, Arch's, developers, etc. I'm thinking the levels they want to reduce will be lower than they wanted at management/executive but I could be very wrong.

As follow up to my last post (below), I have worked here for 16 years. The only options they gave me were:

1) Sever on March 31st and collect 22 weeks of pay

2) Sever before March 31st and collect nothing

Compared to what they offered managers, it's a sad proposition. Not that the management situation isn't ALSO sad -- it is -- but, well, I think you can see my group wasn't nearly as lucky.

Still, it's better than nothing, and I'm thankful they gave me 6 months to prepare myself to work for another company instead of just dumping me on the street.

Well, to be fair, the reason I call it a buyout is because I was offered WAY Less and wasn't given any sort of option. I was told, here's your lousy severance package: your only options are to stay until March 31st and collect it, or leave and don't.

I didn't get the option to collect a larger check by VOLUNTEERING to leave.

So to me, it's a buyout. They are paying people to voluntarily leave.

I'm not saying your points aren't true -- I'm simply explaining mine.

Of course, you have to remember, I'm in an "effected group" that people tend to forget about, and we got shafted big time.

This is a subtle form of age discrimination, at least partly. Everyone left has to fend for a job and how many 55 plus folkswoujd they keep even though sone of them are the most excellent managers in the company. I am annoyed with people calling it buyout. It is severance plain and simple. Granted they could have offered nothing but for those under 62 it’s not s great deal sincepensikns atenot bridged. I realize pensions are not the same owner fact is people that close to retirement did use thatin their calculations. The directors and AVPs got a lot better deals to get out and they are responsible for the mess that was created with ICP and everything else. Except AP, the queen of failure. She was promoted!

Fair point. If Project Managers are in mix, I suppose they still have something marketable at some organizations, provided they weren't the sort who let the planners do all the work (back when we actually had planners, that is).

The service managers... I don't think many of them have a lot of options. Whatever skills they have, the Farm likely s---ed out of them years ago. I would think many of those who took the buy out were close to retirement age or had a working spouse and maybe kids who had already graduated college and were ready to downsize...

Still, 33% is higher than I would have expected if we're just talking about empty nesters and early retirees. So my suspicion is that some of them either think they have marketable skills or otherwise think the Farm has simply gotten too toxic to stay.

I too wish them luck. Being unemployed is no damned fun.

Not sure how many of those leaders have any marketable skills that are something other than the usual garbage BS on their EPRs. Good luck to them.