We Were All Marx Brothers
Every morning at CIBC Personal Banking began the same way.
The test team sent their status email. On smaller projects it was manageable. On larger, more complex projects — the ones with enterprise scope, multiple integrations, ten to fifty stakeholders — it always said a version of the same thing. Something new had broken with the latest fix. Environment unstable. Testing blocked.
Then came the meeting.
The PM called it. The developers attended. The testers explained what had broken. The developers proposed a fix. Everyone agreed on next steps. The meeting ended. The fix was applied. The next morning the email arrived again.
Something else had broken.
I watched this routine unfold every morning for two years. Four to eight attempts to stabilize a CI/CD change. Three to five days per cycle. Testing perpetually weeks behind on every large project. Deadlines that existed in the project plan bearing no relationship to the actual delivery timeline because the actual delivery timeline had a hidden tax built into every single change.
Nobody calculated that tax. Nobody named it. The morning meeting was simply part of the schedule — as expected and as unremarkable as the morning coffee.
I had worked at Morgan Stanley. I had worked at Citibank. I knew what a functioning CI/CD pipeline felt like. A change that takes three to five days and four to eight attempts to stabilize is not a CI/CD pipeline. It is a daily emergency dressed up as a process.
I mentioned it. Not once — several times, to several people. PMs, the PM director, senior developers. Each time the response was some version of acknowledgment without recognition. Yes, it takes a while. Yes, it’s frustrating. That’s just how it is here.
That last sentence is the most expensive sentence in any organization. That’s just how it is here.
Nobody at CIBC Personal Banking had worked somewhere where it was different. They had no frame of reference for what functional looked like. The three to five day cycle was not a failure — it was the baseline. It had been the baseline long enough that an entire organization of intelligent, capable professionals had stopped seeing it as anything other than normal.
The external consultants who came through — including a Big Four firm that assessed the Digital Card portfolio — never found it either. They could not have. You cannot discover a dysfunction by interviewing people who do not know the dysfunction exists. You discover it by showing up every morning, waiting for the email, sitting in the meeting, and watching cycle six begin.
Every morning we assembled — PMs, developers, testers, managers — and performed our roles with complete sincerity. The email arrived. The meeting was called. The fix was proposed. The fix was applied. The next morning the email arrived again.
We were all Marx Brothers. Nobody knew it.
The difference between a farce and a tragedy is whether anyone is laughing. We were laughing. The budget was not.
This is what Ground-Level Architecture Intelligence finds. Not the problems organizations report — those are already known and already managed. The problems organizations have stopped seeing because they have been normal for so long that nobody remembers they were ever problems at all.
Russ Profant is a solutions architect and independent consultant with 30 years of experience across financial services, healthcare, and government. He runs PC4IT, offering cloud cost diagnostics, architecture assessment, and embedded architecture intelligence to mid-market organizations. pc4it.com