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What is Taylorism and how did it influence project management?

Discover how Taylorism revolutionised project management, shaping work dynamics from the Industrial Revolution to today’s people-centric approaches. 📈🕰️

Published on 22 February 2023

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

9 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/wHYYfvAGFow

What is Taylorism and how did it influence project management?

Taylorism

Taylorism is named after a 19th Century management guru known as Frederick Winslow Taylor.

He conducted a ‘time and motion’ study for many of the big manufacturing concerns of the late 1890s to early 1900s, and the focus of the study was to understand how organizations could be more efficient and productive.

How do we deliver more products within shorter time frames.

He is the father of modern business management, and by extension, waterfall-style project management because he is the person who identified that there should be a best practice that is followed to achieve X outcome, and that supervisors should instruct workers how to do that.

In essence, managers are the brains of the operation, supervisors ensure work is done according to how it must be done, and workers are the commodities that execute against a predetermined plan.

In a simple or complicated environment, we are repeating the same tasks over and over so you can identify a best practice and create a process of system of delivery that ensures a specific outcome.

So, his work and thought leadership in the space became incredibly popular and informed pretty much everything that evolved from there. It is only when we entered the complex space that this framework or approach to product development proved unreliable and created more problems than it solved.

Context for Taylorism

In Taylor’s world, outcomes were guaranteed.

If you built clocks, you were guaranteed a clock at the end of the manufacturing process. If the organization had great systems and processes, you would have great quality clocks being delivered frequently and efficiently because you understood how best to build great quality clocks.

At the time of the industrial revolution, demand far exceeded supply.

So, we had sparse markets with very little in the way of competitors, and from a consumer demand perspective, people had very little in the way of choice and had to line up for whatever products and services were available at the time.

The ideal situation for a manufacturing company, and a tough position to be in as a consumer.

If you weren’t impressed with waiting for a clock, it didn’t matter, there were thousands of people lining up behind you to buy one as soon as it was available.

Globalization

If you manufactured clocks in London, you probably only served a market within London. Bigger manufacturers might have served England, and a very rare few organizations would serve a market that included the United Kingdom and parts of Europe.

Much of the work was localized and not subject to the challenges of globalization.

Supply chains. Dynamic markets. Disruptive competitors.

A great example of this power imbalance between manufacturers and consumers is the well-known quote from Henry Ford, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, as long as it is black.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor developed his recommended practices, behaviours, and techniques based on the business context of those times, and it never really evolved from that base recommendation for the next 100 years.

Command and Control.

In a manufacturing plant, the work is monotonous and single minded. A worker pulls this lever or presses that button, a thousand times a day, and so they are bored and frustrated. In many ways, they will try find ways not to do the work because it is soul destroying.

That’s why you need supervisors.

To crack the whip and ensure that people are fired if they don’t do the work, and rewarded with a minimal salary if they do the work correctly. Managers set the direction for the team and support the supervisors in enforcing the tasks.

The primary traits of a great employee are compliance, diligence, and obedience.

Even today, many large organizations still embrace Taylorism and create their systems and processes based on the idea that senior managers and leaders are the top of the work food chain, and the people who perform the work are commodities that could be replaced without effort or cost.

Project Management

The outcome of Taylorism is that organizations replicated the military with a hierarchy of command and control. The senior managers and business leaders set the strategy, decided on how products or projects would be funded, and then hired a consultant to tell them what the best practice for developing that product or service would be.

That instruction then flowed down the hierarchy and workers did as they were told, when they were told, and provided with predetermined cost and time constraints to complete the work.

If you can’t do the work within these deadlines, and within that budget, we will replace you with someone who can. If you can, and you do it before the deadline and for cheaper than we planned, you will be rewarded with a supervisory or management role.

Over time, measures and tools were developed to track the work and provide project managers and senior managers with insight into how the project was progressing, and what they could reliably anticipate at predefined milestones on the project timeline.

Things like Gantt Charts, developed by Henry Gantt in 1906, and later project management processes like PMI and Prince, followed by the introduction of project management software.

In the 1950s, the US Military Industrial complex took a firm grasp on many of the elements of Taylorism and deeply embedded these processes and practices in their environments. The success of this approach led to greater adoption of Taylorism throughout the world, and the formalization of project management as a profession and structured industry in the 1960s.

So, there have been some evolutions, especially from a technology perspective, but not much in the way of divergence from a command-and-control culture of management and project management.

You group people by ability and traits that align with command-and-control strategies.
You standardise the processes and systems within the environment.
You standardise the tools that are necessary to do the work.
You train people to perform simple, repeatable tasks in a specific way.
You hire professionals to execute the complicated work in an efficient, repeatable way.
You focus on efficiency and cost reduction at every step of the supply chain.
You seek to automate tasks where possible and reduce the need for human intervention.
You divide the business into silos based on function, such as marketing, sales, logistics.

And so forth.

Separate departments and train them exclusively in those ability-based functions.

As you cut costs and remove the need for human intervention, productivity increases as does profitability and predictability.

Over the past twenty years, more organizations have made an attempt to place a greater emphasis on people and a more humane way of developing products and services, but those efforts are often thwarted when people come up against bureaucracy and organizational policies that stifle creativity.

The Agile movement, created in 2001, was a recognition that the ‘old way of working’ no longer worked in a complex environment. Was no longer effective when we needed to create a complex solution in the face of compelling, complex problems.

Because we had never solved the problem or build the solution before, there was no magic recipe to follow nor could we reliably predict outcomes based on current interventions. We needed to cocreate, collaborate, and experiment to discover the best solutions.

Managers possess the least amount of technical knowledge, skill, and capability to do the work, whilst workers possess the most knowledge, skill, and experience in solving problems and creating solutions, so something needs to change in how decisions are made and how projects are funded.

We need structures, processes, and frameworks to support that new way of working and we needed to develop tools, systems, and cultures to effectively solve the challenges associated with the 21st century.

So, in a nutshell, this is the rise and fall of Taylorism over the past 125 years. This is why traditional project management is designed the way it is, and why it needs to evolve if it is to be effective in complex environments moving forward.

In a simple world, like moving bricks from point A to point B, project management works a treat.

Sure, you could treat workers better and you could create a more fulfilling, rewarding, and financially secure environment for them, but ultimately, your focus is on getting the job done well and project management facilitates that perfectly.

In a complicated world, such as building bridges and other civil engineering, you need professionals who are deeply skilled and knowledgeable about the process of building bridges, but you also know the best way to build the bridge, how long it will take to build the bridge, and how much it will cost to build the bridge, so project management works a treat in this application too.

The chief engineer knows the most about building bridges well and cost effectively, and they become the driving force for informing, guiding, and showing others how to do the job well. A hierarchy works just fine, and as the work moves down the ladder, it becomes less complicated and more repeatable.

The chief engineer designs the systems and processes, the trained engineers execute against that plan and ensure that the people beneath them follow the plan to the letter, and those people ensure that the person who digs the trench digs it well and in alignment with the plan.

Everybody is reasonably happy. Everybody is reasonably productive. Everybody knows exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

So, traditional project management works well in this application too.

Conclusion

Taylorism played a critical role in helping the world advance. It played a critical role in helping companies achieve competitive advantage, and to build better, more cost-effective solutions for consumers. It did a great job when aligned with the correct application.

So, agile doesn’t knock project management, it simply acknowledges that it isn’t fit for complex environments and recommends a new approach. It also acknowledges where project management is a strength, and recommends that organizations stick with that approach for a simple or complicated application.

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The question was what is terrorism and how did it influence project management? I think that’s an interesting question because taylorism, let’s quantify that first. Taylorism is the name of a gentleman called Frederick Winslow Taylor, who back in the 1880s and 1890s was kind of like the thought leader, the management consultant of the time. He worked with all of these big factory owners. He did a time and motion study about the work, trying to figure out how do we get better at delivering more stuff because in those days the outcomes were guaranteed, right? Because you had a factory that made clocks and you were going to get clocks out the other end of the factory. We just want more clocks, supply and demand.

But in that world, during the Industrial Revolution, the demand was much higher than the supply. So we had very sparse markets, not so much competition. We didn’t have that globalization. So if you were making clocks in Europe, you were selling in Europe. If you made clocks in the UK, you were probably selling in the UK. If you made clocks in China, you were probably selling in China. They didn’t have that globalization, so competition was very low and customers didn’t really know much about the products that they were buying. So they just bought what they were provided, right? They weren’t asking for different things; they weren’t trying to get different stuff.

So you had this very low dynamic, low competition marketplace and a whole bunch of tools and practices were developed around this space. Frederick Winslow Taylor is what we call taylorism. He developed a bunch of these techniques, started developing them, and one of the fundamental bases that they worked with was because people doing monotonous factory work, because they disconnect from the work, you find that they try everything they can not to work.

There’s this famous quote from Taylor: “Not a competent worker can be found that does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly they can work and still convince their employer they’re going at a good pace.” I’m sure listening to this, you’re all thinking of those companies that you’ve worked for and with that have that ethos at their heart, that employees are inherently untrustworthy. They’re inherently not going to do their job unless we’re much watching them, treating people like factory workers, right? We need to keep an eye on them. We need a foreman to keep an eye on the people, and then maybe we need managers to keep an eye on the foreman and managers to keep an eye on those managers, depending on how big we get.

And hierarchy is born, right? You get hierarchies, and then because we’re going to put the thinkers at the top of the organization and the doers at the bottom of the organization, because the doers don’t need to think, right? They’re just making more stuff. We know what we’re going to create; we’re creating clocks. Then we can create these hierarchical steering-based organizations where budget comes from the top, decisions are made at the top, direction comes from the top.

And then that kind of progressed through into the Gantt chart in 1906 from Henry Gantt, through into the 1950s where the US industrial military complex took hold of many of these ideas and started incorporating them into the way they work. So you want to divide people into ability-based groups. You want to standardise the processes that they do, train that group only in those processes, and hey ho, we ended up with departments across our organisations with the sales department and the marketing department and the coding department and the testing department and the operations department, right? Let’s keep them separate, train them only in those ability-based groups.

So out of those ideas was born those traditional project management methods. Now a lot of work has been done recently to try and curtail or morph many of those traditional outlooks to a more people-focused approach because it was a staff-focused outlook. But that staff-focused outlook is still at the heart of a lot of those techniques. Yes, I do know fantastic project managers that don’t focus on the stuff; they focus on the people and they get great results. But in my experience, those folks are super rare. They’re booking a trend; they’re not the mass-produced project manager that you find out in the ether.

And what’s happening is that project plan becomes the gold standard rather than planning becoming the gold standard. And so taylorism is really the source of, if you read about taylorism, you read about the scientific management method, you’ll see that influence going through all of the stuff up until the modern era, even through the lean Toyota production system, right? Which was an adaption of those techniques for the more modern world of the 1950s when markets were getting more crowded, right? So they needed new techniques to be able to move even faster.

And that was a lean Toyota production system. But as we move into the modern world, and even 50, 60, 70 years ago, there weren’t really any of these markets that were low competition left. Everything’s high competition, high demand, high variability in all the things that we do. People are starting to want custom capabilities from their organisations, which is why car manufacturers are increasingly adopting agile practices so that they can start delivering these custom capabilities dynamically and quickly to their customers, incorporating the design of the products into the actual delivery of the products rather than keeping them as separate things, right? Design it and then deliver it. They need to constantly be adapting and changing.

So taylorism created was the source of those traditional project management practices, but there are many practices and tools in traditional project management that are still just as valid today. Throw out the baby with the bathwater, but try and figure out how to increase your adaptability, reduce your bureaucracy, reduce the plan, increase planning, and deliver more value.

Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else, add your scrum or devops, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.

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