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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

I've tried or been used to try a dozen or more methodologies over the years, more than I can easily name. Everything from SSADM and ITIL through RUP, various sorts of Agile... all methodologies are complete nonsense with the exception of Kepner-Tregoe.

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I have seen parts of this in other training (six sigma, tqm, etc). But there is something very important in dedicating the time to think outside the most obvious immediate problem, which we often need to be reminded of by process.This was the link I found, but honestly the images in the Google search were better.

http://begrip.be/kepner-tregoe-analysis/

That's the first time I hear about Kepner-Tregoe. Would you have any pointers to some basic reading on its principles?

Unless convinced otherwise and after following the link in the sibling comment I woukd assume OP mentioned 'Kepner-Tregoe' as a jest.

If you can spare £1.60 :-) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rational-Manager-Charles-Higgins-Ke...

I have no affiliation with Kepner-Tregoe the company, nor is that an affiliate link...

Lurker MBA student interested in PM roles here. Would be very interested to hear more about what you liked about Kepner-Tregoe, and how you learned it.

I like KT because it rapidly eliminates ambiguity and creates packages of information that can be passed seamlessly between teams or stages in a workflow. There's little or no rework in a KT shop, and few "pipeline stalls" where someone is blocked because a decision hasn't been made or communicated, or because a dependency is discovered too late. I learned it at a company I was at about 10 years ago, there was one guy who had used it in his previous job and he convinced senior management, and so we were all sent to KT for their training course.

If you want to get a flavour of it the original book is pretty cheap now https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rational-Manager-Charles-Higgins-Ke...

Like I say I've tried 'em all, well nearly, KT is the only one that's worth a damn. Even the simple exercises like "is, is-not" make you feel like Poirot.

Based on the description at the link, Kepner-Tregoe analysis looks like a useful and light framework for eliciting and applying critical thinking in project management. But the key words are "critical thinking." The principles of the agile manifesto when put in practice by people who have domain knowledge and who have aptitude for critical thinking confer on a project a good chance of success.

Those kinds of projects and teams have that edge over others because they have critical thinking on their side. That will benefit them first in seeing that they don't need to add a large, trademarked, expensively trained process around agile, and subsequently in remaining focused on people and code rather than process.

Tangentially related, I recommend learning and getting certified in Lean Six Sigma. It's PM * stats * MBA. The systems analysis / theory of constraints perspective also completely explains why agile falls short in the face of external road blocks.

I did KT in 1998, 20 years later and it's still hands down the most powerful course/learning I've ever had.

10 years for me, and ditto. Everything else is just snake oil.

unified process is not complete non sense. It's the best I found so far and maybe the only methodology that covers projects longer than a few weeks and from start to finish.

The commercial IBM version (RUP: Rational Unified Process) with the associated tool (rationals TM) and consulting service is really horrible though.

A great book regarding Unified Process is:

http://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Book_Applyin...

I found its practical blending of UP with concepts traditionally associated with other processes quite illuminating.

For example, here is a snippet from section 1.1:

Iterative Development, Agile Modeling, and an Agile UP

Given many possible activities from requirements through to implementation, how should a developer or team proceed? Requirements analysis and OOA/D needs to be presented and practiced in the context of some development process. In this case, an agile (light, flexible) approach to the well-known Unified Process (UP) is used as the sample iterative development process within which these topics are introduced. However, the analysis and design topics that are covered are common to many approaches, and learning them in the context of an agile UP does not invalidate their applicability to other methods, such as Scrum, Feature-Driven Development, Lean Development, Crystal Methods, and so on.

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