American Express

1. The 56th Street location has a beautiful campus and an impressive cafeteria.
2. The contract wage is OK.
3. The American Express brand is good.
4. The large expat population is intelligent, well-educated, and motivated.
5. At the director level and above, I see a lot of caring and astuteness.

I worked in the Next Generation Data Management team. Their goal was to "build a best-in-class, globally consistent reward and benefit programs that delight and engage our customers, drive profitable growth, and maintain healthy economics along with our compliance requirements."

I'm contributing this review to provide additional insight to anyone considering working for American Express in NGDM either as a DBA or a DA. I don't want someone else to go through what I went through. I cannot speak to whether it's a good idea to work in another role or department. But I wish I had this insight before I accepted my position.

Don't say you weren't warned.

American Express is facing significant challenges and competition. One of the challenges is to replace the revenue that will be lost next year when they lose their Costco co-branding. Amex is working out other ways to replace that revenue, with Sam's Club, for example. But the market is forecasting that this won't be enough. We see this in the erosion of its stock price and the increasing volume of short sales.

Here are some of the problems I saw.

1. The biggest problem is the department's rejection of Agile. They will usually listen in via teleconference, but they won't appear for a program increment. Thus, they will never ask questions and show confidence in the milestones when it comes time to make a commitment. This is in violation of the Agile rules that American Express tries to enforce, and it is absolutely critical to Agile/project success. But they somehow get away with it. I'm convinced that neither the DA nor the DBA leads understand Agile or have any desire to make it work. The upshot is that the leads' unwillingness to align with Agile means that they do not align with business strategies that are coming out of the C-suite. This results in a lack of velocity and a general sloppiness for implementations. The lead DBA shouted "BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS DON'T MATTER!" when I mentioned that they were going to violate a milestone. Apart from the tone, which in itself should be a HR issue, there is the substance. That a DBA or a DA can sabotage a program increment policy that is driven down from the vice presidential level and above is rather remarkable and speaks rather poorly of the quality of leadership that could enforce alignment to goals driven through Agile. DAs and DBAs don't make policy. They execute, and that's all that they do. At other companies that I've been at, such a person would have been fired.

2. Communication and collaboration is poor. The leads are off site most of the time. During the four months I was there, the DA lead was on site no more than eight hours in total. Almost without exception, his IM visibility was turned off. The leads were extremely hard to reach. Sometimes, they didn't respond to e-mails or telephone calls, or, when they did respond, responded inappropriately or superficially. When there was a connection, there was a tremendous ambiguity as to what he or the department needed. On several occasions, he said "don't volunteer for anything" and "we don't talk to the business." The purpose of Agile is to break down these silos, but this department is doing its best to maintain them.

3. I see little curiosity or desire to provide uplift. There are no peer reviews. The result is a lack of conformity between models and many mistakes. Models that could take three days take three weeks. The lead DBA has mainframe expertise but knows little about big data and Oracle. His chief qualification seems to be longevity and abrasiveness.

4. I see a lot of cynicism in the department, coming from those who have been around. "Magical mystery tour... Month Python skits" are some of the characterizations of the department to Agile PIs. At the PIs, conversely, I have heard something very different about the team I was on. "They are the department of no" and "We try to avoid using them if we can." The credibility of the DAs and DBAs is low from the perspective of the internal customers and other executives. After a while, I started to get little pride from being associated with the team.

5. There's the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have the best strategy in the world, but all of that is worthless if team members cannot communicate, collaborate, and align with upper management. The current culture rewards inertia rather than leadership, integrity, and excellence. Because of these issues, politics rather than excellence and rationality reigns. There's a lot of incentive to not rock the boat. "It is what it is" and "that's the way we've always done things" are constant mantras that I heard when I was at Amex. If you want to get along by going along, if you embrace mediocrity, Amex is for you, at least at this location.

1. Dissolve the DA and DBA team and merge them into an enterprise-level DA and DBA team. Nothing whatever is gained by having DAs and DBAs act reactively to projects outside of the Agile framework. Right now, all that they deliver is missed timetables and poor quality.

2. If you don't want to take that step, then replace the leads. Bring in people who can commit to Agile and do know Big Data and Oracle. Right now, the leads are the problem, not the solution. Their knowledge base is stuck in the last century, and it shows.

3. If you don't want to replace the leads, make them 100% accountable for the projects. "That silence is consent" is a principle of Agile. If they say nothing, they agree to everything. Enforce it, and make sure that missed deadlines have consequences.

4. Get away from your screen and do a Gemba Walk. Start looking at work product and team dynamics. Attend a few Agile program increments and see for yourself the dysfunction that I saw. I think you will be astonished at what you see and realize that I'm not making this up.

5. Try to align work that needs to be done with headcount. I simply didn't have enough work, and the people who are there right now are perfectly capable of absorbing additional work without bringing more people. But what is needed is better and stronger leadership, which at present doesn't exist.

6. Don't settle for excuses. I worked only a few feet away from the DBA lead. I heard him complain how busy he was and how it was too hard for him to get tested or certified in Oracle. Set a higher standard. Raise the bar.

American Express has an excellent brand and a storied history. I appreciated the opportunity and I enjoyed working with the people there. There is a lot that is really good at American Express. These aren't bad people, but the leads do need to be managed. There clearly are pockets of dysfunction that can only be addressed by upper management. These issues will continue to plague American Express, impacting its growth, profitability, and brand. Until those issues are addressed, I cannot recommend working for American Express.