Conversations from the 2022 SAFe® Summit: SAFe at Chevron – Business Agility

Guest: Josh Burdick

Conversations from the 2022 SAFe® Summit: SAFe at Chevron Podcast Episode Transcript

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to the SAFe Business Agility Podcast. We took a short break to brainstorm new ideas to improve the show, but now we’re back and excited to bring you new stories, perspectives, and updates about SAFe. Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to this special edition of the SAFe Business Agility Podcast, featuring in-person conversations captured at the 2022 SAFe Summit.

Josh Burdick:

We needed to move quicker, We needed to make decisions faster, and that’s where we decided to make the pivot to Agile.

Speaker 1:

In today’s episode, Josh Burdick, a certified Agile coach and project manager at Chevron, explains how a century-old company shifted its culture to embrace an Agile mindset, make faster decisions, and respond to new markets. We hope you enjoy the show.

Tim Shisler:

Josh, why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about what work you do with SAF and your role within Chevron?

Josh Burdick:

I’ve been with Chevron for 15 years, and most of that time has been in IT project management as an IT project manager. And about four or five years ago, we started making the transition to Agile, and so I started to explore the roles of Scrum Master and RTE, and then became an Agile coach and then became an SPC in 2019. I spent three months in Angola, training folks in different forms of SAFe and Agile. I spent one month in Buenos Aires as the pandemic was occurring. I was in Kazakhstan. And ever since then I’ve been coaching teams and also doing various teaching of Agile and SAFe; in total about 80 Agile courses since 2019.

Tim Shisler:

Were you a trainer previous to your work with Agile?

Josh Burdick:

I was not actually. You know, as a project manager, I would be called upon to teach, sometimes our project management courses that we had. We did Waterfall before. And in the course of being a project manager, part of what I would have to do is help to train and coach the team on how this works and the business leaders and so forth and so on. But full-time training like this, I hadn’t really done until SAFe.

Tim Shisler:

So about four or five years ago, you go Agile, you’re starting to think about it. What’s going through your head as you’re starting to kind of understand what this world is, how it’s going to be different? Where’d you even start to look?

Josh Burdick:

Well, at first when I looked at it as a career project manager, I had some trepidation. If you look at the Agile model, the project manager doesn’t exist. So, I’m looking at a new model to where, “there goes my career.”

But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that the way I had done project management is, you know, I always like to say I was Agile before Agile was cool. I would regularly empower my teams. I would leave the details to them. I would make sure that we understood the strategic goals of what the business was looking for and so forth and so on. But I would really allow the teams to refine kind of how they work, and empower them. And that’s a key agile concept right there; empowering individuals, empowering teams on how they do their work.

Tim Shisler:

So, if you’re training now, you’ve been through your own experience of realizing, here’s this new model, I don’t exist in it, you know, what is my identity? How quickly then do you talk to your students to get over that challenge? Or, do you let the students discover on their own and then come to you and say, “Hey, I’m not sure where I fit.”

Josh Burdick:

So, we have those questions and a lot of times we can find them in places. You know, folks become Scrum Masters, folks become RTEs. A lot of the folks in the business are able to fill the roles of the product owner or the product manager. And the more they see how this process works of transparency and being able to influence what we develop over time in terms of the backlog and things, they really seem to like the fact that they have such influencing power in the process.

Tim Shisler:

So, training 80 classes over the last two and a half, three years, what are the top five things that you wish you had known when you started originally?

Josh Burdick:

I wish I had known a little bit more about how we do it, right, in terms of things like non-IT. Because we get a lot of questions about that. And so I’ve learned a lot more about that from the students themselves. You know, I wish I had a better understanding of the totality of SAFe. Because even after 80 courses, you’re not going to know everything. I don’t proclaim to know everything. And so there I get information from my students, because when they ask questions, that causes me to think. Hmm. Interesting. And sometimes there’s not one right answer, right? And so that’s certainly something to take away from that.

Tim Shisler:

Are you working with a lot of non-technology folks?

Josh Burdick:

Right now I’m in the IT function at our company. And so mainly, we cater toward the IT folks, but when we open up our classes to our Chevron employees, they can come from any part of the company. And so I will have people from upstream in there. I will have people from manufacturing in there. I’ll have people from HR, and they want to know, well, how does this apply to them? And I know that with Agile, historically we are IT-centric. And that’s one of the great things that I’m learning about SAFe in this conference is that y’all are trying to really open it up to applying Agile to just about everything we do, which it does apply because transparency and feedback applies to any type of work.

Tim Shisler:

So, when do you see that aha moment then for the non-technical folks really understanding, hey, this is something that’s valuable to me. Talk to me a little bit about their arc from, you know, this is new, I’m not sure, to wow, I actually want to learn more about this.

Josh Burdick:

When they fully understand the regular cadence, right? When they see that, OK, these teams are going work in two-week iterations, or sprints, and at the end of those two weeks, they’re going to do a live demonstration. Not a PowerPoint slide, not a set of talking points, but a live demonstration of what they said they were going to do in that time period. And then people are able to give feedback to that and influence the future. And then the other takeaway they get from that is, we don’t get hard-coded into these long-timed roadmaps, right? Historically what we would do is we’d build a project plan and they would want a detailed project plan a year and a half out, committing to certain dates and timelines. Well, now the only thing we commit to is the current time box, whether it’s the sprint or the PI; anything else is forecast. And like the future, it can be changed based upon empirical knowledge in current business needs at that case. And they really like that.

Tim Shisler:

So that’s freeing them up, right? It’s giving them an opportunity to say yes or no, to think about where they are.

Josh Burdick:

Exactly. And so that’s one of the hardest cultural changes to be able to make, especially with regard to individual contributors, is empowering the teams and the individuals to say, “No, we don’t have the capacity to do that. You know you come to us with a prioritized list of 15 features for the next PI. Well, we’ve done PI planning, we’ve developed our draft plan; we only have the capacity to do the top 10 features, right? And so, we’re going to have to say not “no” permanently, but “no,” not right now.

Tim Shisler:

So then how do you open up the space for people to have that epiphany in a class? Is it making sure that the PO is there, the PM is there, that they have the support of leadership possibly in other areas saying this is important? How do you get folks to accept that this is more than just lip service on a PowerPoint deck?

Josh Burdick:

It’s hard. That’s where the cultural shift needs to happen, right? And it doesn’t happen overnight. So certainly having leadership support, which we do have at Chevron from the upper levels down. And of course, they model that behavior, but it’s going to take a while. Because when I came into Chevron back in 2007, part of my remit as an experienced hire, as a project manager was to build org capability around waterfall project management. And we did a really good journey for the next 8 to 10 years of getting above world-class performance in project management. But we realized around 2017, 2018, that the digital imperatives, the digital transformation, how fast the world was moving, and so forth and so on, we needed to move quicker. We needed to make decisions faster. And that’s where we decided to make the pivot to Agile. So, we’re only four or five years into this journey and turning the ship around, it’s going to take a while. But people understand that and are open to that and our leaders understand that.

Tim Shisler:

What do you think is giving them the agency to be open to this? What is their pressure that is causing them to put the effort into this?

Josh Burdick:

It’s just the current world that we’re in, you know. Chevron has been around for well over a hundred years and there’s no guarantee that we’ll be around for the next hundred years. There’s a lot of competition. We have changing imperatives in terms of the environment, carbon neutrality, things like that. And the idea is that we need to be able to be responsive to these changing business needs and business conditions a lot quicker than we used to in the past. And so that’s one of the reasons why they’ve really opened to this change.

Tim Shisler:

So for yourself as a leader at the very front of this discussion with them, once they go through the course, they interact with you, they learn something new, they go back to their daily work, how are you then making sure that they are continuing their learning, coming back to you with questions? Because it’s only two days, three days, four days, right, out of their life that they’re getting this. How do you keep that momentum moving forward?

Josh Burdick:

Well, I use these classes as a vehicle to get them excited about Agile, in the Agile mindset, and in SAFe. And what I’m introducing to them is not a rule book of ‘you have to do it this way’ and so forth and so on. I’m opening you up to some of the best practices that come from around the world and which are constantly evolving. If there’s an Agile book, I own it and I have a stack of books and I will hold up books during the class and I will show them this and I will say, “If you want to read more about it, take a look at this.” I want them to get excited and go down the rabbit hole like I did, and like a lot of my colleagues did. And start your own journey into finding out how to apply this.

And then also, of course, you know, we have other coaches at Chevron, and we have experienced RTEs and Scrum Masters. And so, I encourage them to work with their respective RTEs and Scrum Masters to find out what they need to do, but also feel free to come to me. Since I’ve been doing it remotely, we’ve used Microsoft Teams, and so the chat for the class remains long after the class is done. I said, “So let me know when you’ve gotten certified, let’s celebrate that, and then feel free to come to me. Feel free to come to my colleagues and run stuff by me.” Right? “Hey, we’re doing this, we’re thinking about doing Weighted Shortest Job First. What do you think?” And I’ll say, “Hey, you know what? You’re on the right path. Keep going.” Or, “Hey, this is something that you might want to think about.” Right? Rather than, “Well you have to do this.”

Tim Shisler:

Yeah. I think we run into that problem, right? At times people think it’s prescriptive, they have to do it by the book, but it is adaptable. You know you do have to find the way that works for your organization. Every organization has their own culture and their own way of working. So, we can’t displace that with SAFe only. So then as a trainer, with the amount of knowledge you have, when did you start feeling comfortable being able to break away from, ‘I have to train you to make sure you get certified’ to, ‘I know I’m going to give you enough information and I can start adapting this to our way of work.’ How long did that take?

Josh Burdick:

Well, for me it was almost immediately because, you know, they sent me to Angola, and Angola is a different environment to where the folks that live there have had a history of political turmoil and civil war and things like that. And they have certain issues with the infrastructure still, you know, electricity and stuff like that. So, the people that work there, they have a sense of what’s really important versus just what’s not as important. And so by being able to talk with them and them to be my first real audience in this, they helped me to feel more comfortable as to what really applies and makes sense and knowing that they can change it for their particular environment, for their particular needs. And they responded to that well. And so I just took that ethos from wherever I went ever since then.

Tim Shisler:

So I think you’re ahead of the curve a little bit as the way that you think about SAFe and the way that you’re adapting SAFe in the organization, you know, four to five years in, at the beginning of it still. But you’re more mature than some. How then are you using the materials that we’re creating as a company outside of the training specifically to help foster that transformation?

Josh Burdick:

I’ve been introducing them to SAFe Collaborate. So that’s something that I do with some of the Scrum Masters that I work with and be able to say, “Hey, look, here’s an option if you’re doing some brainstorming, pruning the tree, for example, right? Feel free to use this if you don’t have another tool that you’re using.” You know, some of the measurement tools that y’all have, right? The agility measurement tools. I’m excited about what y’all are doing with regards to benchmarking KPIs to where we can see, well where are we doing pretty good at, but where do we need some improvement, right? Because there’s always something to improve. You know, what I tell folks is we’re never going to achieve perfection, but what we want is our fifth iteration to be better than our first iteration, and we want our 10th integration to be better than our fifth iteration. And the same thing with the PI as well.

Tim Shisler:

Do you see, when you’re thinking about leading and lagging indicators, the leading indicator is the change of behavior and the way people feel about work, the lagging indicator is the work that’s getting done? Or is it the other way around?

Josh Burdick:

I would think that the first example, right? You know, you start to see kind of the changes in the way people are responding to this. But then, you know, there’s always still a struggle of well we’ve got, you know, how do we do our portfolio management right? And are we working on the right things and how are we doing a better job of prioritizing to it? We have more dedicated teams. And there’s something I think that we’ve made progress in rather than having people spread among three and four Agile teams, which is what typically happens, even if you’re not doing Agile, people usually get spread too thin. And so the idea is trying to get more dedicated teams to prioritize the most high-priority things that we need to work on rather than trying to do it all. Because we can’t do it all. SAFe says we can’t do it all. Life says we can’t do it all.

Tim Shisler:

So speaking of doing it all, if you’re reading a lot of Agile books, you’re living in the Agile world. Where else are you looking for inspiration or thinking about the things that make you better as a trainer or better as a leader? Where else are you looking outside of Agile specifically?

Josh Burdick:

I try to listen to different podcasts. If I can, watch Ted Talks. I follow different folks on LinkedIn and sometimes they’ll share some kind of knowledge. But then the other thing that I do is, you know, I have 20-something years of experience doing waterfall project management and working with many different companies, different deployments, and things. And so I know the weak spots that we tend to have with large deployments, with interacting with people and such in Waterfall. And Agile isn’t a silver bullet. But I understand what the weak spots are with Waterfall and how Agile can solve some of these problems that are inherent, and large changes that we tried to do. Because we’re still dealing with human beings, right? We haven’t fully gone to the metaverse yet.

Tim Shisler:

Yeah, we’re not plugged in fully yet.

Josh Burdick:

Yeah. So, you know, some folks would say, “Well you’ve got all this wonderful experience, so how can you do Agile?” Well, I can use that experience as a touching-off point to be able to say, well this is how I can improve. BecauseAgile will bring us there.

Tim Shisler:

As we’re wrapping up. Cause I know that you’ve got to get back to a session. I’m just curious, as you mentor trainers and you’re talking to them and you’re giving them advice, what advice are you giving them? And what could you leave our audience with to make them feel more comfortable to possibly train their first course, or maybe they’ve trained a hundred of them and they’re still looking for interesting ways to do better.

Josh Burdick:

Number one, I tell them to just keep it simple, right? Because there’s a bunch of stuff that you can do with your class, right? Sometimes focus gets a little lost with all the shiny objects. So, keep it simple. Focus on the fundamentals of the material. You know, make sure your students are engaged by asking them questions. You know, try to get them to participate in the activities and things, but don’t make the activities so arduous to where it takes you half an hour to explain how it works. And that’s part of this simplicity, right? So, that would be my key takeaway; keep it simple and know that your first few classes aren’t going to be perfect. But over time, you’re going to build up that capability of being able to do this. And it gets better.

Tim Shisler:

Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for taking a few minutes with us. I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and uh, we look forward to hearing more about your success and the future.

Josh Burdick:

I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Tim Shisler:

Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to our show today. Be sure to check out the show notes and revisit past episodes at scaledagile.com/podcast. Relentless improvement is in our DNA and we welcome your suggestions for the show. If you have something to share, send us an email at podcast@scaledagile.com.