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.

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.