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Comment by all_blue_chucks | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> what is the next PM fad to replace agile

SAFe ...

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