Every methodology on this list showed up with proof already attached — ITIL and DevOps proved themselves in IT operations, Obeya on Toyota’s shop floor, XP in teams that could ship daily, DORA across a slice of engineering orgs already measuring the right things, EBM wherever it was built to prove itself, OKRs at Intel and then Google, in a culture built to support them. None of that proof was ever about your organization. That’s what this series checks, one methodology at a time.
- Why Nobody Writes About ITIL and DevOps Anymore — ITIL wasn’t wrong when it was built; it just never ran its own Reverse Validation once the world it was built for moved on.
- The Wall That Stopped Talking — an Obeya wall doesn’t go blank when it stops working, it just starts telling you what fits the format instead of what’s true.
- Extreme Programming Was Right About Everything, Except Who It Was Talking To — XP answers the how exhaustively and has almost nothing to say about the who or the until when. [
- DORA Tells You If You’re Fast, Not If You’re Fit — four green numbers answer Fit for Execution and stay silent on the other three questions.
- Green Dashboard, Wrong Building — EBM measures whether the work is producing value, not whether it still belongs where you put it.
- OKRs Were Never the Problem — the method didn’t fail at Google or Intel; what fails is adopting the practice without any of the conditions that made it trustworthy.