Scientific management in today's world (Ch. 3, #1)

Classical management approaches are definitely alive today in my experiences in the consulting business. We are in constant competition with other companies to win client work and we are tasked to come up with the most efficient plan possible. I've worked on quite a few project plans where we had to predict the exact amount of labor it would take to complete a task. We estimate the hours it would take an analyst to complete a task and multiply it by their cost rate. This total is a major input on how much to charge the client for our work. This particular example follows the division of labor and the “individualizing the organization” label used in the Scientific Management portion of the text.

Scheduling tools are constantly improving and it is very apparent that lots of people are using scientific management methods to plan and organize their lives. For me, I use an online calendar for activities and most things are color coded (although I like to think I have a decent memory). I have colleagues who solely rely on their devices (PDAs, smart phones) to tell them when/where they need to be someplace. I also just came across an article today about a Self-Writing To-Do List. It seems that online scheduling will get even easier since this tool will interpret spoken commands and written sentences to build calendars – there will be no need to manually update calendar details! In a sense, it seems that the technology is enabling us to become very machine-like in organizing our lives. :)

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20887/page1/