15 ms·

Whatever happened to Six Sigma?

219 points by respinal 7y ago

diabeetusman 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
More or less the same thing that happened to bell-bottom jeans.
- lalos 7y ago
  Ironically, they are actually making a comeback.
- lvspiff 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 https://toolshed.com/2015/05/the-failure-of-agile.html
    - sgt101 7y ago
      from the link "it's an idea". I notice that evidence is mentioned further down, but evidence that this will work, has worked or might work in the future, well, I see none.
- derekp7 7y ago
  Did that company happen to have a logo that looked like the Batman Signal?
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    You mean the company that created Six Sigma?
  - EForEndeavour 7y ago
    Serious question: which company are you referring to?
legitster 7y 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 7y ago
  Your thoughts on agile development are spot on. Eventually "agile" will become a bad word snickered at the same way waterfall is.
  - colechristensen 7y 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.
    - paulmd 7y ago
      In most cases what you need is management permission to move quicker. Everyone says they want to be agile, but doesn't want to invest in the tooling (unit and integration tests, build servers, etc) that would let you be agile, so you end up with agile overlaid over the waterfall methodology, which does absolutely nothing.
      - derekp7 7y ago
        Fortunately with cloud and open source tooling, there isn't anything to buy. And management is already excited about cloud because they read it in CIO magazine and their buddies mention it on the golf course. The only thing needed is training on proper usage of the tooling. But that can come about organically when companies accidently hire a few competent engineers.
baxtr 7y ago
<Rant> Why I am hoping right now to see the exact same title for Agile anytime soon?
rb808 7y ago
RIP. Agile & Scrum have been the overused term and overconsulted management buzzwords of the last few years. Any idea what's next?
- shakezula 7y ago
  I could see "micro-_____" bleeding into business circles next quite easily.
  - ad-hominem 7y ago
    I know, we'll call it "micromanagement" to fit with microservices. done. We're billionaires.
  - Multicomp 7y 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 7y 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.
ascales 7y 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_chucks 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
flyinglizard 7y 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 7y ago
Oof, I'm just finishing the green belt certification that my company offered. It's just normality tests and linear regressions.
- lemcoe9 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - growlist 7y ago
    It's just micromanagement, as far as I can see.
excessive 7y 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.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  I really want it to be "samurai", but it will probably be something like "habits of highly effective people".
  - cptnapalm 7y ago
    The Habits of Seven Highly Effective Samurai
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      Magnificent. I would like become a certified trainer for your system and resell it to cargo-culting businesses in buzzword-laden seminars, please.
      - Accujack 7y ago
        The Habits of the Magnificent Seven Highly Effective Samurai
smarks 7y 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.
- presidentscroob 7y ago
  Yep. It's another in a long line of management consulting's flavor-of-the-month subscription to TPS reports' KoolAid (TM). If there were such a thing as Scroob's law, it would be: An employee's worth is often inversely proportional to the number of their résumé-padding, bullsh!t certifications that they milked yee olde corp for tens of thousand$ in off-site conference$ and week$ of training.
- mayankkaizen 7y ago
  That is an entertaining story. Can you provide the source for this story?
robertAngst 7y ago
Six Sigma, where statistical process control has turned into... a beast. I would say I've seen 2/10 projects be SPC related. Although 1 of those 10 were pretty loose.
dlphn___xyz 7y ago
agile is the new cool methodology
madhadron 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
I'll tell you what happened to Six Sigma. Management shipped it overseas. (another symptom of change in the corporate world)
loteck 7y 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.
H8crilA 7y 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 7y ago
  GE is sinking because of Immelt's reckless tenure, inlcuding the purchases of Alstom and Baker Hughes.
  - H8crilA 7y 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."
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
malicioususer11 7y ago
this is too true. I put 666 Sigma in my profile and I didnt get a single application request. :'(
k__ 7y ago
OT: some comments here now have scrollbars on mobile (chrome) which makes scrolling the comment section rather cumbersome. https://imgur.com/a/iua0GJw https://imgur.com/a/iua0GJw
- jackthetab 7y ago
  I've noticed the same thing recently and agree with your assessment. Is this an HN thing or a Chrome thing?
  - k__ 7y ago
    Does only happen in comments, not in "threads"
johnmarcus 7y ago
Devops anyone?
- orthoxerox 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
Only 0.0003% of the organizations who tried it could make it work.
projektfu 7y 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.
- sgt101 7y 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.
booleandilemma 7y 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 7y ago
  Why would Project Manager need to be technical? I think you’re confusing what PM’s job responsibilities are.
  - folkhack 7y 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 7y 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.
- micmil 7y 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.
presidentscroob 7y ago
I think they got deprecated by the Six Sigmas. - Teamwork - Insight - Brutality - Male Enhancement - Handshakefulness - Play Hard (TY 30 Rock)
RickJWagner 7y 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 7y ago
Same thing seem to have happened to ISO 9001 and others.
sgt101 7y 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.
philpem 7y 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 7y ago
with agile the goal is 3sigma
nstart 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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/ 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 7y 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.
- zhte415 7y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662668 [1] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/waterfall.html 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.
bitwize 7y ago
People started realizing the truth: Engineers who can do engineering, do engineering. Engineers who can't do engineering, become Six Sigma consultants.
soapboxrocket 7y ago
I remember seeing a number of companies that used 5S+Safety because Six Sigma was a trademarked phrase.

219 points by respinal 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

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

lalos 7y ago
Ironically, they are actually making a comeback.
lvspiff 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 https://toolshed.com/2015/05/the-failure-of-agile.html
  - sgt101 7y ago
    from the link "it's an idea". I notice that evidence is mentioned further down, but evidence that this will work, has worked or might work in the future, well, I see none.
derekp7 7y ago
Did that company happen to have a logo that looked like the Batman Signal?
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  You mean the company that created Six Sigma?
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  Serious question: which company are you referring to?

legitster 7y 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 7y ago
Your thoughts on agile development are spot on. Eventually "agile" will become a bad word snickered at the same way waterfall is.
- colechristensen 7y 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.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    In most cases what you need is management permission to move quicker. Everyone says they want to be agile, but doesn't want to invest in the tooling (unit and integration tests, build servers, etc) that would let you be agile, so you end up with agile overlaid over the waterfall methodology, which does absolutely nothing.
    - derekp7 7y ago
      Fortunately with cloud and open source tooling, there isn't anything to buy. And management is already excited about cloud because they read it in CIO magazine and their buddies mention it on the golf course. The only thing needed is training on proper usage of the tooling. But that can come about organically when companies accidently hire a few competent engineers.

baxtr 7y ago

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

rb808 7y ago

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

shakezula 7y ago
I could see "micro-_____" bleeding into business circles next quite easily.
- ad-hominem 7y ago
  I know, we'll call it "micromanagement" to fit with microservices. done. We're billionaires.
- Multicomp 7y 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 7y 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.

ascales 7y 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_chucks 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

flyinglizard 7y 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 7y ago

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

lemcoe9 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
- growlist 7y ago
  It's just micromanagement, as far as I can see.

excessive 7y 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.

logfromblammo 7y ago
I really want it to be "samurai", but it will probably be something like "habits of highly effective people".
- cptnapalm 7y ago
  The Habits of Seven Highly Effective Samurai
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Magnificent. I would like become a certified trainer for your system and resell it to cargo-culting businesses in buzzword-laden seminars, please.
    - Accujack 7y ago
      The Habits of the Magnificent Seven Highly Effective Samurai

smarks 7y 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.

presidentscroob 7y ago
Yep. It's another in a long line of management consulting's flavor-of-the-month subscription to TPS reports' KoolAid (TM). If there were such a thing as Scroob's law, it would be: An employee's worth is often inversely proportional to the number of their résumé-padding, bullsh!t certifications that they milked yee olde corp for tens of thousand$ in off-site conference$ and week$ of training.
mayankkaizen 7y ago
That is an entertaining story. Can you provide the source for this story?

robertAngst 7y ago

Six Sigma, where statistical process control has turned into... a beast. I would say I've seen 2/10 projects be SPC related. Although 1 of those 10 were pretty loose.

dlphn___xyz 7y ago

agile is the new cool methodology

madhadron 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

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

loteck 7y 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.

H8crilA 7y 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 7y ago
GE is sinking because of Immelt's reckless tenure, inlcuding the purchases of Alstom and Baker Hughes.
- H8crilA 7y 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."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

malicioususer11 7y ago

this is too true. I put 666 Sigma in my profile and I didnt get a single application request. :'(

k__ 7y ago

OT: some comments here now have scrollbars on mobile (chrome) which makes scrolling the comment section rather cumbersome. https://imgur.com/a/iua0GJw https://imgur.com/a/iua0GJw

jackthetab 7y ago
I've noticed the same thing recently and agree with your assessment. Is this an HN thing or a Chrome thing?
- k__ 7y ago
  Does only happen in comments, not in "threads"

johnmarcus 7y ago

Devops anyone?

orthoxerox 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

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

projektfu 7y 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.

sgt101 7y 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.

booleandilemma 7y 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 7y ago
Why would Project Manager need to be technical? I think you’re confusing what PM’s job responsibilities are.
- folkhack 7y 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 7y 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.
micmil 7y 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.

presidentscroob 7y ago

I think they got deprecated by the Six Sigmas. - Teamwork - Insight - Brutality - Male Enhancement - Handshakefulness - Play Hard (TY 30 Rock)

RickJWagner 7y 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 7y ago

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

sgt101 7y 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.

philpem 7y 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 7y ago

with agile the goal is 3sigma

nstart 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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/ 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 7y 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.

zhte415 7y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662668 [1] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/waterfall.html 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.

bitwize 7y ago

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

soapboxrocket 7y ago

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