The Beginnings of Management Science

At the tail end of the industrial revolution, in the latter half of the 19th century, a man by the name of Fredrick Winslow Taylor was promoted from machinist to foreman. He noticed that workers were doing things their own way. He understood that if he could standardize how things were done, he could systematically discover the most efficient way of doing something. Using time and motion studies, he went through considerable effort to determine the most efficient way various tasks could be completed and became one of the first people to look at management as a science, even publishing a book called “The Principles of Scientific Management”.

In his quest for standardization, he was met with much resistance from front-line workers , and as a result Taylor advocated that only managers, not front-line workers, should have authority over how to complete tasks. He furthermore divided jobs into very small steps, so that each worker would only have to complete a handful of motions. In many ways Taylor looked at – and treated – workers as robots.

The Quest for Efficiency

With productivity reportedly increasing by as much as 400% for some companies, his disciplined approach was financially so lucrative that it quickly spread into various other industries and eventually revolutionized how management was done in the industrialized world, giving rise to the field of quality management. Henry Ford aligned the Ford Motor Company with Taylor’s teaching and was able to shorten the assembly of a single car from 12 hours to 90 minutes. 

Through the contributions of thought leaders like Joseph M. Juran and W. Edward Deming management science further advanced throughout the 1900s. Toyota also paid great attention to productivity, implemented a revolutionary method called single-piece flow. Single piece flow (unlike large batch production) emphasizes the importance of producing only as many parts as necessary to create one (or few) products at a time. This stands in contrast to how things were done traditionally: creating thousands of parts at once and then assembling thousands of cars using those parts. Single-piece flow promised game-changing efficiency gains and made possible variability: producing cars of many different types almost concurrently with only a few production lines.

Toyota further refined their management approach (the “Toyota Production System, TPS”) which was eventually popularized and widely adopted as “Lean Manufacturing”. Together with total quality management, 0-defect-tolerance philosophies, and many more advancements in management science, manufacturing became so efficient that by the end of the 20th century, Peter Drucker, a management theorist referred to as the ‘father of modern management’, concluded that we had mastered the challenge of making the manual worker more productive.

A New Challenge: Knowledge Workers

Drucker also proposed that a new challenge was upon us.... making the “knowledge worker” more productive (knowledge workers are those that use their thoughts to create value rather than their hands to build a product) . While manual workers create valuable goods primarily through motion, knowledge workers use their knowledge to create value (sometimes in conjunction with their hands). Examples of knowledge workers are doctors, nurses, and accountants. Drucker provided a new approach for managing knowledge workers, and it stood in stark contrast to how Taylor viewed manual workers. Unlike Taylor, who considered knowledge workers as disposable, almost robot-like, knowledge workers - so argued Drucker argued that knowledge workers should be considered assets, which need to be protected and invested in.

Concurrent with the rise of IT and software development another phenomenon became more and more prevalent: teams of knowledge workers. In “The Wisdom of Teams” (1992) Katzenbach and Smith helped bring autonomous work teams to center stage, reporting of mystic synergies and unprecedented performance potential. It became quickly apparent that highly performant teams had the potential to supersede the efficacy of employees working side-by-side as was so familiar in manufacturing settings, though few have mastered the art of realizing such potential even today. (Many knowledge-worker teams still exhibit dynamics that resemble that of manufacturing teams more than that of synergistic work teams). And once again, an updated approach to management was needed to support teams of knowledge workers.

Managing Software Development 

As Software Development and teams began to take a more prominent role in the latter part of the 20th century, it became apparent that the methodologies that were used to manage manufacturing and construction projects were not well suited for the software development space. In the 1990s several frameworks, such as eXtreme Programming and Scrum, emerged that promised delivery of software projects with more precision and success. Since Scrum was presented at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) conference in 1995, it has found adoption worldwide as a promising approach  for managing knowledge work. 

In February of 2001, seventeen thought leaders assembled for a weekend retreat in Snowbird, Utah, to discuss what common ground they may find. The result of this weekend was the creation of the “Agile Manifesto”, a simple two page document containing a set of values and principles that, if adhered to, promised to make it easier and cheaper to change direction in terms of features, design, etc. By adhering to the Agile Manifesto, a company can BE more agile. 

Since then other methodologies that offer solutions for managing knowledge workers started to appear, for example Kanban and DevOps. Yet other frameworks seek to make entire organizations agile. (Nexus, Scrum-of-Scrums, Disciplined Agile, Scaled Agile Framework “SAFe”, and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) to name a few).