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On 11/20/2011 8:35 AM, Les Schaffer wrote:
in any case, i am curious if anyone here knows of any critiques of these project planning methods.
Sorry that this does not lead us directly to Gantt and project planning methods in particular, but some of the background to Gantt may be useful in your finding more specific critiques. Gantt was greatly influenced by Taylor (Frederick Winslow Taylor 1856-1915) and your reference reminded me of my short plunge into Taylor's writings a few years ago. I recommend... -a brief scan of Taylor's ideas (try the first 10 or 15 pages of his Principles of Scientific Management, online at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6435 and the rather good articles on Wikipedia on Taylor and on Gantt - especially these sections from the article "Scientific Management". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management ---------------------------------------------------------------- Early decades: making jobs unpleasant Under Taylorism, workers work effort increased in intensity. Workers became dissatisfied with the work environment and became angry. During one of Taylor's own implementations, a strike at the Watertown Arsenal led to an investigation of Taylor's methods by a U.S. House of Representatives committee, which reported in 1912. The conclusion was that scientific management did provide some useful techniques and offered valuable organisational suggestions,[Need quotation to verify] but it gave production managers a dangerously high level of uncontrolled power.[17] After an attitude survey of the workers revealed a high level of resentment and hostility towards scientific management, the Senate banned Taylor's methods at the arsenal.[17] ---------------------------------------------------------------- and ---------------------------------------------------------------- Taylor himself, in fact, recognized these challenges and had some good ideas for meeting them. Nevertheless, his own implementations of his system (e.g., Watertown Arsenal, Link-Belt corporation, Midvale, Bethlehem) were never really very successful. They plugged along rockily and eventually were overturned, usually after Taylor had left. And countless managers who later aped or worshiped Taylor did even worse jobs of implementation. Typically they were less analytically talented managers who had latched onto scientific management as the latest fad for cutting the unit cost of production. Like bad managers even today, these were the people who used the big words without any deep understanding of what they meant. Taylor knew that scientific management could not work (probably at all, certainly never enduringly) unless the workers benefited from the profit increases that it generated. Taylor had developed a method for generating the increases, for the dual purposes of owner/manager profit and worker profit, realizing that the methods relied on both of those results in order to work correctly. But many owners and managers seized upon the methods thinking (wrongly) that the profits could be reserved solely or mostly for themselves and the system could endure indefinitely merely through force of authority. ---------------------------------------------------------------- - Bill ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
