American Express

Good pay package, work-life balance, and employee-friendly policies. Good perks and work-from-home options are available. Higher management is very good and focused.

Middle management is full of inefficient people. Project management is the worst; they say it's Agile, but half Agile is more dangerous.

Multiple teams (reporting to their own directors) don't collaborate for common projects. It's the headache of the tech team, who is driving the project. Every director is running his own shop without helping Amex as a whole.

Complex team engagement processes with no proactive planning. A reactive engagement process kills the essence of true Agile.

No Biz Analyst in the team. Product owners are the worst; they are the old CCPs with no understanding of IT. They are not sure of requirements and the system. The tech team struggles to get clear requirements.

No documentation. Most of the applications have only vendors and contractors, hence Amex herself is unaware of her own systems/applications.

COE teams take limited responsibility. Directors and VPs take no action on escalations.

No roadmap before starting a project. Biz doesn't have a clear governance process on the projects; they just fund and think something magical will happen after 6 months.

Enterprise Architecture teams are not involved during impact analysis. Nobody knows the exact number of upstream/downstream systems involved.

No one takes accountability. Amex is losing a lot of money due to this.

Please fix your delivery process; otherwise, it'll impact Amex in the long run.

I have previously worked in competitor firms like Chase, PayPal, and Discover. They are doing very well. Amex has to open her eyes.

1. Enforce documentation on each project/application.

2. Ensure every application/system is led by a full-time resource, decreasing dependency on vendors.

3. Bring in Business Analysts and train your Product Owners.

4. Bring in full-time PMs/Scrum Masters to drive the project.

5. Plan the roadmap ahead of time. Involve the Enterprise Architecture team and Business SMEs to plan the projects in advance. All impacted systems should be addressed in advance.

6. Engage the impacted teams in advance and put them in a Scrum team. Core members should be 100% allocated.

7. The PMs should report to a different group. They should drive the project, and all project members and impacted teams should be equally accountable to the project.