
Whatever happened to Six Sigma? - respinal
https://qz.com/work/1635960/whatever-happened-to-six-sigma/
======
legitster
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.

~~~
blfr
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.

~~~
tacostakohashi
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.

~~~
MegaButts
Pilots especially are _heavily_ trained to use checklists for just about
everything. A significant chunk of training to be a pilot is just reinforcing
the behavior to _always use the checklist_.

Doctors, based on my limited understanding, are becoming more and more
pragmatic about using checklists in surgeries. I am not a doctor, nor am I an
expert, I have just read some interesting articles and heard from surgeons
that they are trying to improve the process to reduce careless mistakes.

No clue about lawyers.

So processes can actually be incredibly useful, and oftentimes are designed
after the fact. Agile has some neat ideas as well, but in practice I'd say 90%
of the time it's pretty fucking terrible and the company would be better off
without trying it entirely. Not because agile is bad, but because the people
in charge of agile are usually bad.

At the end of the day it comes back to something I've learned painfully time
and time again throughout my career. No matter how talented you are, you are
powerless against a shitty manager.

~~~
sanderjd
I don't know much about Big Law, but I would be shocked if they don't have the
same sort of thing. Hundreds of entry level folks with high turnover with a
simple metric (billable hours) to track their progress; it sounds _ripe_ for
some equivalent to Agile.

~~~
pnw_hazor
No such thing. Each partner runs their own show for their own clients.

Firm-wide common resources such as a docketing departments will have
checklists but they are mostly software driven/automated these days. For
example, creating a new matter in the docketing system will automatically
generate most of the critical dates and checkoffs for that matter.

------
projektfu
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
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.

------
busterarm
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.

~~~
derekp7
Did that company happen to have a logo that looked like the Batman Signal?

~~~
EForEndeavour
Serious question: which company are you referring to?

~~~
stan_rogers
That would be Motorola.

------
all_blue_chucks
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.

~~~
jdgoesmarching
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_chucks
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.

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

------
booleandilemma
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.

~~~
micmil
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.

~~~
Ididntdothis
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.

------
madhadron
> 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
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."

------
flyinglizard
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.

------
diabeetusman
"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
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."

------
philpem
"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.

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

------
H8crilA
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
GE is sinking because of Immelt's reckless tenure, inlcuding the purchases of
Alstom and Baker Hughes.

~~~
H8crilA
> 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."

------
snidane
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
> 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.

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

~~~
cptnapalm
The Habits of Seven Highly Effective Samurai

~~~
logfromblammo
Magnificent.

I would like become a certified trainer for your system and resell it to
cargo-culting businesses in buzzword-laden seminars, please.

~~~
Accujack
The Habits of the Magnificent Seven Highly Effective Samurai

------
sgt101
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.

------
alexmlamb
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.

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

~~~
lemcoe9
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.

------
loteck
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.

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

------
nstart
> 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.

------
rb808
RIP.

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

~~~
trhway
>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.

~~~
Ididntdothis
“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
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.

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

Is this an HN thing or a Chrome thing?

~~~
k__
Does only happen in comments, not in "threads"

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

------
sleepysysadmin
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.

------
newsreview1
I'll tell you what happened to Six Sigma. Management shipped it overseas.
(another symptom of change in the corporate world)

------
RickJWagner
Six Sigma reminds me of the insanity that was ISO9000.

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

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

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

~~~
lvspiff
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"

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

------
sabujp
with agile the goal is 3sigma

------
dlphn___xyz
agile is the new cool methodology

------
baxtr
<Rant>

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

------
johnmarcus
Devops anyone?

~~~
orthoxerox
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
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.

