Stacey on Software

Agile

Scientific Management

July 29, 2021

In 1909, Frederick Taylor published a paper entitled The Principles of Scientific Management. At this time in history, things got made by artisans. It required a great deal of time for the artisan to build a thing, especially complex things. Ironically, the “rule of thumb”, the common sense these artisans applied, was not so common. The products created varied greatly in price and quality.

Taylor proposed that by leveraging the widely available generally unskilled labour force, you could get things done faster and more efficiently. The model was that someone who knew the craft could break down the work needed so that even those who didn’t know the craft could do the simple operations. He believed that people were motivated by money, and he promoted the idea that “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” would inspire people to work in an organization that operated in this way.

Optimizing those operations fit well with Taylor’s background in mechanical engineering. The notion of “time and motion” studies helped operations understand how they could better utilize people’s time.

The Canadian Region of the United Auto Workers, known today as Unifor, was formed in 1937. My grandfather (he had a single-digit union member number) and his co-workers formed it after the workers’ strike at the GM Oshawa plant that year, following the charter established by workers in the US. This information is very hard to find in the history books, because at the time it would have gotten you at least beat up, maybe killed. My grandfather and my father were tool and die makers - makers of the machines that made the machines. Apprenticeship remains the primary means of educating folks in the skilled trades, and university education was uncommon in my family.

Unions were borne of the need at the time to protect the workers from unsafe working conditions, and to help companies understand what “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” entailed from the perspective of the workers.

Coming back to Taylor, these were his 4 points laid forth in that paper:

  1. Use the scientific method to study work and find the best way to perform tasks
  2. Match workers to jobs based on capability and motivation, train them by people who know the job best to work at maximum efficiency
  3. Monitor their performance, supervise and provide instructions to maintain efficiency
  4. Managers should study the work, plan and train. Workers should work the plan provided and apply their training diligently

Fast forward a hundred years.

Look at the people around you. Their education level has flipped, it is very common now to have a university degree in some field.

Look at the work around you. Our duties aren’t physical tasks like grab that grinder and mallet and get that door fitted to those lug nuts. Two strikes here, grind that burr there, a quick jolt, and the door fits perfectly. Oh, they were working on the panel press this morning. Call my supervisor over and they check with the engineer, and one more strike of the mallet over there, and yeah perfect 2mm even gap along the bottom. Three strikes it is. Here’s the next car…

Today, our duties require us to apply our knowledge and education to solve a problem. We are quite literally, knowledge workers. Compare what you do today to the story of our auto line worker above. There may be some similarities, but think about how many judgement calls you make in a day about how best to get the work in front of you done.

And moreover, we work in software. In addition to having little to no uniformity in the work that comes our way, we are strongly influenced by changes in the systems we use that are outside our control. Think about that tenuous love/hate relationship we’ve developed with Apple and Google.

Software has about as much analog to manufacturing as hummingbirds to shovels.

This drastic change in climate, this shift towards knowledge work, forces us to consider how Taylor’s 1909 paper could even apply. When our context shifts, our solutions shift, and a hundred years provides a dramatic difference in context. It was groundbreaking at the time, but today it has little application.

But us humans, we have many great thinkers among us. In 1982, W Edwards Deming wrote a book called “Out of the Crisis” which famously presented his 14 points that could help organizations in North America pull out of the crisis in quality in the manufacturing industry at the time.

Deming’s points read very much differently than Taylor’s.

  1. Create a constant purpose toward improvement
  2. Adopt the new philosophy
  3. Stop depending on inspections
  4. Use a single supplier for any one item
  5. Improve constantly and forever
  6. Use training on the job
  7. Implement leadership
  8. Eliminate fear
  9. Break down barriers between departments
  10. Get rid of unclear slogans
  11. Eliminate management by objectives
  12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship
  13. Implement education and self improvement
  14. Make “transformation” everyone’s job

Again, these points geared towards manufacturing, and some of them don’t really mean what the words seem to indicate. They can be a little confusing in software development.

I could write volumes on the 14 points above, but I couldn’t do as much justice as others already have. If you’re curious, you should start with reading books by Mary and Tom Poppendieck in the field of Lean Software Development.

But in my mind, the distillation is fairly simple.

Taylor lived in a world in which clear instruction on simple tasks performed by a largely uneducated mass workforce was instrumental in delivering the Industrial Revolution.

Today, we live in a world where higher education is the norm. We have a sense of the world far greater than what’s outside our front door. We can go to the Internet and learn just about anything, and we often do. The problems we solve are orders of magnitude more complex.

Deming’s 14 points centre on purpose, autonomy and mastery. Everyone is responsible for our purpose, and we pull together as a team rather than as a composite of disciplines.

Software development as a career or commercial endeavour has never existed in the same world in which Taylor laid the foundation of management theory that is still taught and followed even today. And yet I continually see these ideas applied in organizations doing software development.

As an agile coach, I challenge you, let’s embark on a better way.


Welcome to my personal blog. Writing that I've done is collected here, some is technical, some is business oriented, some is trans related.