Whatever happened to Six Sigma?

https://qz.com/work/1635960/whatever-happened-to-six-sigma/

by respinal • 7 years ago

219 196 7 years ago

"And as with all fashions, once Six Sigma was picked up by the masses, fashionable companies lost interest and moved on to the next big thing. “These things have a life cycle: They get popular and then people start looking for something else,” says Art Swersey, a professor emeritus of operations research at the Yale School of Management. “These things run their course, and it has run its course.”"

ttraub• 7 years ago

So says a friend of mine who has written two books on Six Sigma and for a few years was consulting full time in QC. He told me: "At its core, Six Sigma is a set of very old, well established tools encased in a slick marketing shell. There is nothing revolutionary. Inevitably, Six Sigma fades away and something new will take its place, using the same old tools."

liability• 7 years ago

More or less the same thing that happened to bell-bottom jeans.

lalos• 7 years ago

Ironically, they are actually making a comeback.

lvspiff• 7 years ago

So you mean it will make a return in 20-30 years just under a different name? Something like Hexadic Derivation? I can see it now - "I'm HD certified"

busterarm• 7 years ago

Who. Cares.

I worked at a company 8 or 9 years ago that kept hiring all of these Six Sigma Black Belts who sat around _doing nothing_, earning high salaries and making all of the wrong moves. Didn't stop our stock from sliding into the sub-dollar range.

at-fates-hands• 7 years ago

Had the same thing happen at a company I was first hired at as a developer back in 2008.

They hired a director from outside the company because Six Sigma was still kind of a big deal and he was a black belt. It took them two years of consistent failure to figure out Agile was the way you did software development, not applying Six Sigma industrial manufacturing principles to software development.

The amount of analytics and metrics we were responsible for was insane under that director. I lasted two months before I tapped out.

Yhippa• 7 years ago

to figure out Agile was the way you did software development

This is the problem. This stuff gets cargo culted from one fad to another. I'm curious to see what comes after Agile.

Oh wait! I actually have the answer. It's called GROWS: https://toolshed.com/2015/05/the-failure-of-agile.html

derekp72• 7 years ago

Did that company happen to have a logo that looked like the Batman Signal?

vonmoltke• 7 years ago

You mean the company that created Six Sigma?

EForEndeavour• 7 years ago

Serious question: which company are you referring to?

lacampbell2• 7 years ago

Where might one acquire these black belts? (I've got bills to pay)

falcongod0827• 7 years ago

Go into consulting.

bitL2• 7 years ago

SUN used to be like that in its final phase - six sigmas everywhere, people teaching how to use "neurolinguistic programming" to achieve one's goals, cool zen-buddhist priests in management, and the bottom fell out...

sgt1018• 7 years ago

I had a colleague who ran a whole neurolinguistic programming initiative; he just would not shut up about it.

legitster• 7 years ago

Like a lot of business methodologies, the principles are sound - but eventually they turn into cargo cults around a meta-process that only exists to feed itself.

The exact same thing is happening now with 'Agile' where big corporations are switching to sprints and hiring scrummasters, and renaming departments - mostly as a way to stay hip and cool. But at the end of the day, there is no business framework that will replace good judgement and discernment.

ahsteele• 7 years ago

Your thoughts on agile development are spot on. Eventually "agile" will become a bad word snickered at the same way waterfall is.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

At least "waterfall" never existed, it was invented by people to describe something somebody else was doing.

The design-build-test cycle necessary for physical products where the build and test phases can take days, weeks, or years was being used for software where build/test can take seconds or at most hours -- faster design cycles are beneficial and lots of folks used to engineering things got stuck with really long cycles. You don't need a management framework to accomplish those faster cycles.

falcongod0827• 7 years ago

That's what happens to everything that management gets their hands on. Agile is slightly different though, it was corrupted as a concept and commodified long before the big guys decided to embrace it.

blfr2• 7 years ago

This is the managerialist dream. To replace employees' judgement and competence with a process and management methodology. That way everyone is just a replaceable cog in their beautiful machine.

It never works.

bitL2• 7 years ago

One could argue that mathematicians tried the same since Bourbaki? A set of mechanical rules in logic to describe everything...

tacostakohashi• 7 years ago

What is it about software development that keeps on attracting these "methodologies"?

Why don't doctors or lawyers or commercial pilots have people coming along with a methodologies for doing their jobs?

I have a few ideas, but I still feel like there's more to it than I quite understand.

lacampbell2• 7 years ago

It seems to me that if you're an IC in a large team, you are a fairly replaceable cog.

Of course a large percentage of the cogs of any machine fly off at the same time, you're in trouble. But I don't think one IC matters much in any large organisation.

james_s_tayler2• 7 years ago

Well you could say it never works optimally, but it depends on what you are optimizing for. A lot of people think that because business need to make money that they should optimize for making the most amount of money and therefore try to maximize productivity. They look at organizations and what they see is very much at odds with that.

In reality they don't try to maximize employee productivity, they try to maximize employee fungibility.

If all the company is trying to do is survive then I'd say it definitely works.

Aloha• 7 years ago

It works great... until you have an issue the process was never designed to handle, then everything just explodes.

sixtypoundhound• 7 years ago

Hmm... actually, process and outright automation (the apotheosis of process) work brilliantly for certain types of work.

Got something boring and repeatable? Process / Automate the daylights out of it. You'll be better off.

Anything that requires innovative thinking or customer focus? Requires fitting square pegs in round holes? Probably isn't going to go so well...

Speaking as someone who spends more time trying to manage the former (boring + repeatable), independent humans are generally the key point of failure in any process.

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

This is the managerialist dream. To replace employees' judgement and competence with a process and management methodology. That way everyone is just a replaceable cog in their beautiful machine.

It's ironic in the adoption of sold-as-Agile processes, since it is precisely the idea that Agile (as in the Manifesto and associated Principles) was a firm reaction against.

sgt1018• 7 years ago

this. I got into real trouble a few years ago by speaking my mind to my MD about the latest motivational posters which portrayed our business unit as a machine made of gears and cogs. I had two objections. One, people are not cogs. Two, the gearing system on the pictures wouldn't work. I got approbation because I was not "commercial enough" and also "not onboard" but the pictures stopped being made. So... a win.

The thing that strikes me is that engaged and experienced employees deal with rafts of problems silently, using their networks to create and co-ordinate responses without executive intervention. In fact executive intervention is actively avoided because there isn't enough time in the exec's diaries to communicate and debate the issues properly so inevitably such intervention will be via over simplified solutions that often make things worse. The problem with this is that execs do not see what is happening. If they did they would be impressed and pleased with what is going on, but uneasy about the risks and their irrelevance. What this then leads to are management culls where value is lost because the problems that are being solved are not acknowledged in the company before the cull. After the cull this all emerges as a huge and nasty surprise that the company now lacks the capability to deal with.

The lesson : not everything (in fact not much) about a business is on the balance sheet, and in the corporate world the dead have no voices.

growlist2• 7 years ago

Not least because the environment is constantly evolving so as to make the One True Methodology™ redundant.

RestlessMind• 7 years ago

a process and management methodology

After being a manager, I'd say that is not a wrong goal. If your team's success depends on individual heroes, then it is a fragile setup. People can be absent for a lot of reasons - changing jobs, parental leaves, disabilities, ... A good manager should put in place appropriate processes such that even if someone leaves the team, the show goes on smoothly for everyone else.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

The cargo cult happens at small startups too.

meta-process that only exists to feed itself

I like to think of it like an evolving idea passing through people. The methodologies evolve to take advantage of certain human characteristics which aren't always positive and often revolve around controlling others and perfectionist order. People get sucked in by the enticing promise of better but only if we change the process here and here which leads to an enormous amount of time talking about how you're going to talk about how you're going to do your work.

Retric• 7 years ago

Some processes also end up becoming the new norm.

A few professional certifications went from being fads to mandated by law.

Accujack4• 7 years ago

"professional engineer"

hindsightbias• 7 years ago

My assumption today is that every Wharton, Haas and Harvard MBA comes with at least one semester of “Microservices will solve all your IT problems”

falcongod0827• 7 years ago

They are almost right, Microservices absolutely bring all of your IT problems to front and center.

omarhaneef• 7 years ago

Our sigmas go to 7!

zhte4152• 7 years ago

And where do your sigma shifts go? 1.75?

jedberg• 7 years ago

The exact same thing is happening now with 'Agile'

I'd say that it started happening about 10 years ago. Even then companies were hiring for scrum masters and all that other crap.

trentnix• 7 years ago

good judgement and discernment

Otherwise known as leadership.

Certifications and systems and methodologies can make good leaders better, but I can't say I've seen an example where they've turned a non-leader into a leader.

falcongod0827• 7 years ago

Maybe an example of good leadership, but not an example of leadership. You don't need to earn leadership these days, you can purchase it or be born into it, especially at a large corporation.

falcongod0827• 7 years ago

You're not abstracting far enough, "business" is the cargo cult. All the derivatives are simply expected.

crispyambulance• 7 years ago

There's some really sound ideas in six-sigma as well as the other practices that evolved from manufacturing like Lean, Kanban, TQM, etc.

These approaches work, for real.

The problems start when they become excessively dogmatic, or as some say cargo-cultish. These systems are intended to help people solve problems in an orderly way, they're not a replacement for common-sense judgement, and original thinking (which, <gasp>, is STILL NEEDED).

Sadly, the personality types that tend to go into supply-chain and manufacturing (and that's where I happen to work) tend to be frequented by rigid-thinkers who crave process and prescriptive "checklist" approaches. Whatever new thing these people take up, it's eventually ends up as a turgid mess of dogma.

PopeDotNinja• 7 years ago

As a mentor once told me --there's no protection from being a moron.

JustSomeNobody• 7 years ago

Where I work, we are rigidly agile because the policies surrounding it are so strict there's no room to actually be ... agile.

ubermonkey• 7 years ago

This is interesting to me, because I work in a "methodology" business -- except in our field, everyone understands that properly implementing Earned Value Analysis requires the combination of:

- Good people, who know what they're doing; - Good processes, that support those people; - Good tools, which enable the processes

There's been no effort (of which I'm aware, anyway) to turn this into a cargo cult. EVMS complex, and takes a lot of work to implement, but it has real & demonstrable benefits on large-scale projects. So it gets to stay a "real" thing and avoid the weird cargo-cult transformation that's plagued other ideas.

soapboxrocket2• 7 years ago

The goal is to make sure you are gone before the title roll back around to the original titles. I worked in a aerospace firm and the took all the R&T (Research and technology because development was done by production) titles and changed every single one with innovation. Then about 8 years later, they rolled all of them back, killed all innovation titles and put R&T back into the titles. Net result, not much as most of the same people were in the same positions.

bitwize3• 7 years ago

I was frustrated at work about whether our "Agile" practices were really agile, and then the Rick Sanchez voice in my head spoke up: "Look, Morty, nobburpody gives a shit how 'agile' you are, or whether 'stories' actually meet the qualification for user stories, or whatever other horseshit you can think of. No one gives a shit about quality, either. All that really matters is that you make the ink on the bottom line black and make your boss look good. You could literally be shoveling out buggy shit with waterfall and no one will complain as long as you meet those criteria. Don't like it? Tough titty, motherfucker! Welcome to wage slavery! Now swallow your food pellet and get back to work, those giant capstans aren't going to turn themselves."

mo1ok• 7 years ago

A mantra sort of appeared in my mind watching agile fall apart and fail at a large fortune 50 company - "there is no replacement for leadership."

baxtr• 7 years ago

<Rant>

Why I am hoping right now to see the exact same title for Agile anytime soon?

rb808• 7 years ago

RIP.

Agile & Scrum have been the overused term and overconsulted management buzzwords of the last few years. Any idea what's next?

shakezula• 7 years ago

I could see "micro-_____" bleeding into business circles next quite easily.

Multicomp• 7 years ago

On the process side, agile is out, Lean is back in, scrum is persona non-grata.

On the tech buzzword side, I've started hearing micro-frontends all over the place (think 9 iframes arranged in a grid, but with javascript).

trhway• 7 years ago

Any idea what's next?

i think we should be grateful to FB/Google/AMZN/etc. for not coming up with (nor publicly embracing/promoting) any such new madness - I mean giving the copycat "monkey see, monkey do" nature of the management we'd for sure get a replica of whatever these biggie ones would cough out like we got for example the "cool" open floor plans which the FB/Google use to dampen down into the manageable range the otherwise stellar performance of their elite workforce :)

After having survived and successfully recovered from the [pretty devastating in some cases] damage by the most recent process-first innovation hurricane that hit our industry several years ago - ie. the Agile/Lean/Scrum, the industry has been living in a kind of mini golden age since then - the mentioned big [super]successful companies have been producing technical-first innovations (from which some process innovations like DevOps do get derived), and thus management has been naturally copycatting the good things like embracing of cloud, Kubernetes, AI/ML, [micro]service oriented architectures (don't mistake it with the first monster of SOA of 15 years ago :), etc.

johnmarcus2• 7 years ago

Netflix's chaos monkey comes to mind.

falcongod0827• 7 years ago

One should always be grateful to their future overlords.

Ididntdothis4• 7 years ago

“i think we should be grateful to FB/Google/AMZN/etc. for not coming up with ”

“Move fast and break things” did some damage.

ascales• 7 years ago

Making large org-level changes to milk efficiency out of existing processes is capital intensive, and companies shortchange their own efforts to save money. Changes through Six Sigma are expensive to implement.

"Agile" has promised cheaper improvements, and companies ate that shit up.

all_blue_chucks2• 7 years ago

Project management is hard. It will always be hard, because it involves working with humans. But nobody wants to admit that; we want easy answers. So we will chase fad solutions until they become popular and everyone realizes that project management is still hard. Then we'll move on to the next fad solution.

What I want to know is: when does agile go the way of six sigma, and what is the next PM fad to replace agile? There's lots of easy money to be made as a consultant training people on the next big fad.

apl002• 7 years ago

I've been on dozens of different teams at small and big companies and agile implementation has been different on every team I've been on. It has a good way way of just being a template and teams usually implement their own style to make things work for that unit. For that reason I think agile will be around for a while.

There is no magic bullet for PM. The truth is estimating how long X feature will take is hard. Its hard for product managers to for see everything and this leads to incomplete requirements. Which leads to inaccurate estimates and pushed out timelines. Even when requirements are fairly thought through, things always come up that no one saw. Shit happens. The key to being a great PM is making sure the team is always working on whats most important and then managing expectations with senior leaders. Takes some blunders to fine tune that skill though.

cjblomqvist• 7 years ago

I think it should be noted that Six Sigma is mostly (originally?) aimed at processes which are not projects, such as factory operations. There's my point of view there's a big difference.

jdgoesmarching• 7 years ago

I don't see this as a bad thing even though it's framed that way. As you said, project management is hard and the field isn't that that old, especially in tech. Processes and techniques will come and go as we learn from the old and build up the new. One might even say we ~iterate~ on them.

Six sigma is a manufacturing process that was shoehorned into business and software development. There were some great concepts that probably influenced later methodologies, that's far from being a useless fad. You wouldn't call the sledgehammer a fad because we have jackhammers now.

To tie the analogy together, these are just tools. We would both probably agree that having the best tools don't matter if you don't have good, well-trained people behind them.

all_blue_chucks2• 7 years ago

I'm not saying methodologies are useless; having some structure is better than winging it. But they are absolutely fads. Nowhere is this more clear than in the terminology. Black belts? Sprints? Punting? Scrum masters? That's pet rock level fad stuff, and I say this as an "agile" PM... who was at one point was encouraged to get a six sigma black belt by management chasing a fad.

mywittyname• 7 years ago

Six sigma wasn't really a project management solution. It was an iterative process framework specific to manufacturing where the number of defects would be measured, the causes of common defects were identified, then resolved. The process would continue to iterations until the number of defective widgets produced was reduced below two-in-a-billion.

This remains a very effective approach in large scale manufacturing. Many engineers still learn about this in school; if not explicitly six sigma, then at least the statistical underpinnings and application of it.

Six sigma was a victim of its own success. Business leaders tried to expand and generalize this framework to apply to different areas of business. This doesn't work well because building a billion nearly identical widgets is nothing like managing a team of accountants.

hinkley• 7 years ago

We know that requirements gathering is the most problematic part of project management, and yet we have very few tools to deal with this.

It's a huge blind spot, and I've seen little to no progress in this area for my entire career.

falcongod0827• 7 years ago

Project management isn't trivial, but it isn't outrageously difficult either. What makes it difficult is when you need to spend hundreds of hours a week making up numbers that bear no relationship with reality in order for someone above you to put a green box in their powerpoint presentation.

namdnay• 7 years ago

what is the next PM fad to replace agile

SAFe ...

flyinglizard• 7 years ago

There are some sound principles in Six Sigma. There are also some gross misunderstandings and optimizing towards meaningless metrics just because it makes things look good in the Six Sigma world.

I’ve been an engineering lead in an organization which worked by Six Sigma. It provided a nice, standardized framework and a focus on metrics, but I’ve seen people again and again take absolute shit and “optimize” it to meet the metrics instead of fixing the underlying issues. I’ve seen another person (VP level, former professor) get to very illogical conclusions because Six Sigma methodology said so.

So I’m all for adopting some Six Sigma principles as an underlying quality process, but please use sound judgement together with it.

Ftuuky• 7 years ago

Oof, I'm just finishing the green belt certification that my company offered. It's just normality tests and linear regressions.

lemcoe9• 7 years ago

Don't feel bad. Green Belt offers a neat set of tools that can help you prove something to a manager in the future. Black Belt just continues to build on the same information.

minimaxir• 7 years ago

The best jokes on 30 Rock were the ones lambasting NBC's then-owner GE's business culture.

I honestly never realized Six Sigma/green belt/black belts were actual unironic terms it used until much later in life.

geodel• 7 years ago

Well terms like extreme programing, sprint, scrum/scrum master are also used unironically today. And claiming people over process equally hilarious where devs stand like chump each morning to provide banal status update and spend rest of the day as death by JIRA.

growlist2• 7 years ago

It's just micromanagement, as far as I can see.

excessive• 7 years ago

When I was a kid, my father worked at a place that was pushing the "Five Nines" methodology for manufacturing. I'm guessing the next management fad should be Seven Something.

logfromblammo2• 7 years ago

I really want it to be "samurai", but it will probably be something like "habits of highly effective people".

cptnapalm• 7 years ago

The Habits of Seven Highly Effective Samurai

smarks• 7 years ago

Scott McNealy was a protegé of Jack Welch, and Scott applied the Six Sigma philosophy to Sun. There was a whole corporate effort to get people trained up as black belts, etc. During the mid-2000s when the company was struggling, it was quite telling that the first people laid off from any organization were the Six Sigma Black Belts.

mayankkaizen• 7 years ago

That is an entertaining story. Can you provide the source for this story?

dlphn___xyz• 7 years ago

agile is the new cool methodology

madhadron• 7 years ago

Deming’s methods became systematized into Six Sigma

I think Deming and anyone who has seriously studied his work would take exception to that. Most of the underlying mental models are missing from Six Sigma, and all that remains is a watered down version of Statistical Process Control 101.

mikey_p• 7 years ago

Yeah, I think this is really missing the point of Deming. While statistical quality control was a big part of what he taught, he was almost more interested in the philosophy of management than process management. Everything you read about him talks about statistical quality control, but nothing ever mentions his Fourteen points, or Seven deadly sins. I read about him as a kid, but alot of it has stuck with me through multiple careers, and his Fourteen principles could easily be applied to most software and engineering teams and companies.

Things that are really key to his philosophy (and deeply impressed me) were:

* Cease dependence on mass inspections for quality control (Do you rely on manual testing for every release?)

* Break down barriers between departments (i.e. devops)

* Eliminate slogans and quotas, goals, targets etc. (Maybe try the release train process for shipping software instead?)

And my personal favorite:

* Eliminate barriers to pride in workmanship, for hourly workers, management and engineers (is part of your team embarrassed by bad UX or known bugs that they can't fix because they are busy with other work?)

Deming's philosophy basically wrote an entire ad campaign for Ford, "Where quality is job #1."

kwhitefoot• 7 years ago

The way Six Sigma was presented to me by Mike Harry was that it is a tool for finding out where to apply your effort. I've not been involved in it for a long time and am sad to hear of his death. The great thing about it as he presented it was that it did not require a great deal of sophisticated tools or a lot of statistical knowledge just a spreadsheet and an appreciation of multi-way analysis of variance.

When I was working with engineers using Six Sigma in the late 80s, early 90s, Six Sigma was not really to do with day to day statistical process control. It was all about finding assignable causes of variation and how variability in each part's properties contributed to the variability of the whole. The connection with process control was that it helped you decide what tolerances one could allow. In several cases the Six Sigma investigation resulted in widening the tolerances instead of narrowing them as it was found that they were pointlessly tight and resulting in more costly processes. In many others it resulted in a change to the process, adding steps, replacing parts, etc., and not just an adjustment to the process' parameters.

newsreview1• 7 years ago

I'll tell you what happened to Six Sigma. Management shipped it overseas. (another symptom of change in the corporate world)

loteck• 7 years ago

Do popular methodologies suffer from popularity? Is the opportunity to turn the methodology into a brittle, monolithic and successful enterprise perhaps just too tempting? Before you know it, the high principles and ideals on which the methodology was founded are now helmed by corporate sponsors at HP, Lockheed and Capital One. Rust gathers, staleness sets in, since the point of the methodology is no longer substantial or revolutionary improvement, but simply preservation and perpetuation.

H8crilA2• 7 years ago

Six sigma has nothing to do with GE's overall performance. They are ruined by their insurance exposure. Not just Markopolos thinks it's already bankrupt, Buffett sold his stake several years ago because he didn't understand what's going on with the books.

If this ship sinks some people will pick up the good engineering pieces going on sale. "Six sigma" may still be effective there. But it has little do to with GE stock.

supsep• 7 years ago

GE is sinking because of Immelt's reckless tenure, inlcuding the purchases of Alstom and Baker Hughes.

H8crilA2• 7 years ago

The issues outlined by Markopolos lie primarily in GE's troubled Capital unit, a financial services division often seen as a black hole in the company. The Capital unit holds commercial and personal loans, as well as insurance policies that include coverage of long-term care.
In his report, Markopolos suggests that an accounting rule change for insurance liabilities and a significant lack of reserves to cover long-term care liabilities will push GE to take a $29 billion hit. While GE called the report meritless, an analyst said the allegations reflect "a GE culture that historically hid losses and deceived investors."

k__2• 7 years ago

OT: some comments here now have scrollbars on mobile (chrome) which makes scrolling the comment section rather cumbersome.

https://imgur.com/a/iua0GJw

jackthetab• 7 years ago

I've noticed the same thing recently and agree with your assessment.

Is this an HN thing or a Chrome thing?

k__2• 7 years ago

Does only happen in comments, not in "threads"

johnmarcus2• 7 years ago

Devops anyone?

orthoxerox• 7 years ago

Devops in a large enterprise means you can finally get some money for your CI/CD tooling. And some new plush positions for DevOps facilitators/evangelists.

rightbyte• 7 years ago

It's funny how it's hard to get two mid-end PCs to put in the corner but I have to change laptop every 3 years to a new one due to policy.

kbob• 7 years ago

Only 0.0003% of the organizations who tried it could make it work.

projektfu2• 7 years ago

Even Deming said that you can be focused on eliminating defects and fail to keep the market share, fail to delight with your product development. "The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable."

A lot of times, management fads are a procrastinating activity for the organization. The real problem is they are lacking direction. Imagine Apple, circa 1998, going 6 Sigma instead of becoming product-focused. They would get more and more effective at producing a computer fewer people want to buy every month.

Look at what Juran writes about the development of the Ford Taurus, the car that really pulled Ford out of a slump in the early 80s. How much of it is focused on preventing defects? No, it's about designing quality into the car, defining quality as the things that make the car something people want to buy over another car. Doors fitting tightly by having low variation in size is just one aspect, important but not enough.

For Tesla, quality is a 200+ mile range, but also a bunch of other things, without which people wouldn't pay for the battery. I assume that Tesla has quality control but the stories of disorganization in the plant suggest that it's not running at a similar level to the Japanese plants, which also produce millions of cars people want to buy. Nevertheless, they are focused on what makes demand for the car.

sgt1018• 7 years ago

Also price - with disruption (in Tesla's case) on sticker price vs. TCO.

The Taurus could have been every bit as good as a Merc or BMW, but if it had been at a non competitive price point Ford would have had a problem. Being able to deliver at a good price is every bit as important as delivering the quality and the image.

booleandilemma2• 7 years ago

We need a system that doesn’t require project managers, at least not as a full-time position.

I don’t think they’re all that necessary. I think they’re a byproduct of considering developers as high-functioning autists not capable of managing themselves, and we’re in an emperor’s new clothes scenario.

All of the PMs I’ve met have either been wholly non-technical, or they were allegedly technical 20 years ago and they have no understanding of modern technologies. Useless either way.

I think by getting rid of project managers, and the managers of project managers (who are even more disconnected from what’s going on) companies would save themselves a lot of money.

Senior developers could take on a management role. But that’s the key, they should be developers, not people who have a PMP certificate and don’t know what a compiler is.

HatchedLake721• 7 years ago

Why would Project Manager need to be technical? I think you’re confusing what PM’s job responsibilities are.

peterangular• 7 years ago

Why would Project Manager need to be technical?

If they're managing a technical project they better be technically inclined.

I'm sick of having PM's who have no tech chops calling shots for big ticket development items. An MBA doesn't mean you are capable of leading a team of engineers.

username90• 7 years ago

You can't manage a project if you have no idea about the effort and risk associated with each piece of work. A typical job for a PM is to negotiate solutions with a customer, in that case they need to estimate work items relatively accurately in real time to do a good job. Non technical PM's will either make up bullshit estimates and then pressure their developers to follow through or they will be very bad at fulfilling customer needs since they constantly need to verify everything with the devs.

micmil2• 7 years ago

You have a massive misunderstanding of what PM's do, likely because you only ever see one half of their job when you're trying to explain how something works and they're not understanding why it's needed. Trust me, if you had to deal with the OTHER side of a PM's job (dealing with upper management and answering questions about why you're three weeks behind on deliverables without giving technical explanations to people that DEFINITELY have no clue) you'd very quickly decide that it's better to have a meat shield between your team that needs to get shit done and a corporate structure that wants nothing more than to shitcan all of you and outsource you all to India.

de_watcher• 7 years ago

Protective Meat.

Ididntdothis4• 7 years ago

What you are saying is correct. But it also shows how dysfunctional a lot of management structures are. Not too long ago I had a few discussions with my VP and it was kind of shocking how little he knew about what’s going on at the ground level. The information he gets is quite distorted by all the levels of management in between.

blaser-waffle2• 7 years ago

Meat Shields work both ways -- it's also to shelter mgmt from the sausage making process and to keep clusterfucks from taking up the time of higher level resources and managers.

chapium2• 7 years ago

When you have a great project manager who is absolutely rocking it, its a dream. They are helpful inprojects where you lack face to face contact with lots of stakeholders.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

Six Sigma reminds me of the insanity that was ISO9000.

Software is not manufacturing. It took us a few years to figure that out.

JackPoach• 7 years ago

Same thing seem to have happened to ISO 9001 and others.

sgt1018• 7 years ago

I've had TQM and Lean inflicted on me, but this (quoted in the article from a satire) made me laugh out loud : ""embodies a pillar of the Six Sigma business philosophy: teamwork, insight, brutality, male enhancement, hand-shakefulness, and play-hard.”"

There I think we have the red queen challenges of modern western business culture laid out for all the see.

philpem3• 7 years ago

"Lean" and "Lean Six Sigma" seem to be following the same path -- and to some degree "Agile" too.

Big companies like buzzwords and "processes" that'll fix all their woes... except for the elephant in the room that everyone at the coalface knows about.

sabujp• 7 years ago

with agile the goal is 3sigma

nstart• 7 years ago

Silicon Valley’s culture of “move fast and break things” meant business leaders were less concerned with reliability and more focused on game-changing discoveries.

This too is a pendulum. And I for one am looking forward to the pendulum swinging back just a little closer to reliability. Especially in terms of security models and secure by default innovations.

alexmlamb• 7 years ago

The idea of Six Sigma never made sense to me. I read a book on it, and it basically said that you should optimize a business so that mistakes are extremely rare (the six sigma refers to that point on a N(0,1) gaussian cdf).

The idea that you should try to avoid making mistakes seems like a good one, but also is rather obvious, and the right threshold is also obviously problem dependent.

I suppose the idea is kind of fluff, but of all the fluffy ideas out there, trying to be reliable and dependable is probably one of the better ones.

sleepysysadmin• 7 years ago

I used to like six sigma. I worked with an IT director who pushed it bigtime as he came from a large automotive supplier for the big 3.

So much of it made sense. The 5 whys or really just 'get to root cause' is great. Fix the actual problem is way more intelligent than Ticket #348584573 of the same thing.

The problem is that sometimes you break the scripting rule #1. https://xkcd.com/1205/ They'll spend a week analyzing something they don't have enough information about why it failed. It's the first time it ever happened and won't happen again for many years and the fix was literally just restarting a windows service on a server.

snidane• 7 years ago

The goal to ensuring quality was to see your business as a repeatable process. That way you could apply statistical methods, measure and optimize.

The flaw with six sigma was that it is applicable to only very repeatable manufacturing processes where the defects can stem virtually only from random variation in environment. Eg. room's temperature changes, worker sneezing, etc. In this case you are expecting many small probability defects compounded together, yielding a normal distributuon by the central limit theorem. That way you can apply all the statistical methods around the gaussian distribution and try to eliminate 'six sigma' of defects.

The flaw is that people tried to apply this to highly explorative disciplines like software engineering, where the process is very far from being normally distributed. As Nassim Taleb likes to explain, most of the human processes follow an exponential distribution. In the case of software defects, you tend to have many small ones that nobody even logs anywhere and just fixes them (thus being invisible to anybody (PMs) trying to find a pattern). And the other category which are defects where you go down a deep rabbit hole to understand and the fix might require huge rearchitecting of the app. There is no normal distribution, averages on exponential distribution don't make any sense and delivery estimates don't either.

Part of the reason is why lean and agile are the only successful methodologies in software is because they treat it as a discovery process which eventually can be turned into highly repeatable process - by that point operated 90% by a well designed machine.

Many parts od the industry still got stuck with the flawed analogy between software development and construction business. They posit that both should have an architect to design the system and then an army of low paid workers to execute on the plan. The flaw is in thinking that the software developer is the 'worker' and not the architect. He is actually the designer and the worker in the analogy is the compiler, which performs its job so quickly, that project managers don't even see it to include it in their gantt charts.

It's also sad to observe how the certification business is turning the original lean and agile ideas into another black belt type cargo scrum cults.

It helps going back to the roots and listen to Deming, Juran, the guys around agile manifesto and especially system thinkers like Ackoff.

zhte4152• 7 years ago

Part of the reason is why lean and agile are the only successful methodologies in software...

I would highly disagree with a blanket assumption like this:

An discussion on HN [0] discussed the article Waterfall ( Everybody likes to laugh about the Waterfall methodology) [1] and I highly recommend both the article and a discussion as a deeper reflection of assumption of 'Agile vs Waterfall (or anything else)'.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662668

[1] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/waterfall.html

BTW, I keep a small personal wiki of articles from around the web that I find interesting, just in case I might come across as personally invested in any topic; I find the discussion enlightening.

bitwize3• 7 years ago

People started realizing the truth: Engineers who can do engineering, do engineering. Engineers who can't do engineering, become Six Sigma consultants.

soapboxrocket2• 7 years ago

I remember seeing a number of companies that used 5S+Safety because Six Sigma was a trademarked phrase.

Whatever happened to Six Sigma?

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