Management

"Like every other department in Zephyr, Training Sales has an open floor plan, which means everyone works in a sprawling cubicle farm except the manager, who has an office with a glass internal wall, across which blinds are permanently drawn. Open-plan seating, it has been explained in company-wide memos, increases teamwork, and boosts productivity. Except in managers, that is, whose productivity tends to be boosted by—and the memos don’t say this, but the conclusion is inescapable—corner offices with excellent views."

"How she became manager remains a mystery. But there are only two possibilities. One is that Senior Management mistook her tirades for drive and a commitment to excellence. The other is that they knew Sydney was a paranoid psychopath, and that’s exactly the kind of person they want in management."

"It’s simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation."

"Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal."

"Most managers receive much more data (if not information) than they can possibly absorb even if they spend all of their time trying to do so. Hence they already suffer from an information overload."

"The lower the rank of managers, the more they know about fewer things. The higher the rank of managers, the less they know about many things."

"We have overwhelming evidence that available information plus analysis does not lead to knowledge. The management science team can properly analyse a situation and present recommendations to the manager, but no change occurs. The situation is so familiar to those of us who try to practice management science that I hardly need to describe the cases."

"The key to virtually every management science application is a mathematical model."

"Operations research has many precursors and allied fields, including Taylorism (after Frederick W. Taylor), scientific management and management science, industrial engineering and systems analysis. As one early textbook explained, the roots of OR "are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940" (Churchman et al. 1957: 3). Certainly its practitioners have expended much energy and ink in search of an acceptable definition of OR. Morse tried unsuccessfully to halt the debate by declaring OR to be 'the activity carried on by members of the Operations Research Society' (Morse 1953: 159) But his colleagues were not so easily dissuaded from debate. Much of the concern with definition focused on the sometimes elusive distinctions between OR and neighbouring fields; the attempt to define, or redefine, OR was also born of the desire to allow the subject to evolve beyond the orthodoxy of wartime experience. Crucial considerations included the balance between model and application, and the complexity of the mathematics involved."

"The management science approach to organizational decision making is the analog to the rational approach by individual managers. Management science came into being during World War II. At that time, mathematical and statistical techniques were applied to urgent, large-scale military problems that were beyond the ability of individual decision makers. Mathematicians, physicists, and operations researchers used systems analysis to develop artillery trajectories, antisubmarine strategies, and bombing strategies such as salvoing (discharging multiple shells simultaneously). Consider the problem of a battleship trying to sink an enemy ship several miles away. The calculation for aiming the battleship's guns should consider distance, wind speed, shell size, speed and direction of both ships, pitch and roll of the firing ship, and curvature of the earth. Methods for performing such calculations using trial and error and intuition are not accurate, take far too long, and may never achieve success. This is where management science came in. Analysts were able to identify the relevant variables involved in aiming a ship's guns and could model them with the use of mathematical equations. Distance, speed, pitch, roll, shell size, and so on could be calculated and entered into the equations. The answer was immediate, and the guns could begin firing. Factors such as pitch and roll were soon measured mechanically and fed directly into the targeting mechanism. Today, the human element is completely removed from the targeting process. Radar picks up the target, and the entire sequence is computed automatically."

"The subject of management science has evolved for more than 60 years and is now a mature field within the broad category of applied mathematics. This book will emphasize both the applied and mathematical aspects of management science."

"When discussing management and science, I kept saying to myself over and over again that science could be looked at as a kind of management, or that management could be looked at as a kind of science. Saying that science can become a way of managing didn't imply automation or any other form of mechanical decision making, because none of this is science. Science is the creative discovery of knowledge. Management science is the process of trying to look at science as a management function. Similarly, management can be looked at as a scientific function, that is, as a way of finding out about the world."

"Decision theory can be pursued not only for the purposes of building foundations for political economy, or of understanding and explaining phenomena that are in themselves intrinsically interesting, but also for the purpose of offering direct advice to business and governmental decision makers. For reasons not clear to me, this territory was very sparsely settled prior to World War II. Such inhabitants as it had were mainly industrial engineers, students of public administration, and specialists in business functions, none of whom especially identified themselves with the economic sciences. Prominent pioneers included the mathematician, Charles Babbage, inventor of the digital computer, the engineer, Frederick Taylor and the administrator, Henri Fayol. During World War II, this territory, almost abandoned, was rediscovered by scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians concerned with military management and logistics, and was renamed “operations research” or “operations analysis.” So remote were the operations researchers from the social science community that economists wishing to enter the territory had to establish their own colony, which they called “management science”."

"The aim of management science is to display the best course of action in a given set of circumstances, and this must include all the circumstances."

"During and after World War II, a large number of academic economists were exposed directly to business life, and had more or less extensive opportunities to observe how decisions were actually made in business organizations. Moreover, those who became active in the development of the new management science were faced with the necessity of developing decision-making procedures that could actually be applied in practical situations. Surely these trends would be conducive to moving the basic assumptions of economic rationality in the direction of greater realism."

"Now the salient characteristic of the decision tools employed in management science is that they have to be capable of actually making or recommending decisions, taking as their inputs the kinds of empirical data that are available in the real world, and performing only such computations as can reasonably be performed by existing desk calculators or, a little later electronic computers. For these domains, idealized models of optimizing entrepreneurs, equipped with complete certainty about the world - or, a worst, having full probability distributions for uncertain events - are of little use. Models have to be fashioned with an eye to practical computability, no matter how severe the approximations and simplifications that are thereby imposed on them... The first is to retain optimization, but to simplify sufficiently so that the optimum (in the simplified world!) is computable. The second is to construct satisficing models that provide good enough decisions with reasonable costs of computation. By giving up optimization, a richer set of properties of the real world can be retained in the models... Neither approach, in general, dominates the other, and both have continued to co-exist in the world of management science."

"Everybody's daily life consists of problems arising from what you decided yesterday. Managers understand that. Mathematicians want to solve a theorem, publish the results and walk away clean. Managers never walk away clean. The real world is a very dirty place. Clarity is supposed to be the objective of science. I disagree. I think the objective of science is confusion, because confusions carries you into problems."

"Projects and project management... encompasses several thousands of years where evidence exists to demonstrate that projects were used to change and advance societies and that some form of project management was needed to ensure favorable conversion of resources to the benefit of these societies... For centuries, project management has been used in some rudimentary form to create change or deal with change in societies. Change in a positive sense is caused by the application of management action that results in the consumption of resources to create a desired product, service, or organizational process. Change also may be meeting uncertain situations to identify and implement actions to obtain the most favorable outcome. Project management, in whatever form, has been used for centuries to plan for, implement, and meet change... It was the 1950s when project management was formally recognized as a distinct contribution arising from the management discipline. Prior uses of project management had a focus on cost, schedule, and technical performance but lacked the formal definition and embracing of the management concepts and processes in an integrated manner. Since the early 1950s, names and labels have been given to the elements of the project management discipline, helping to facilitate its further development as a profession."

"An important part of project management is keeping track of thoughts, assumptions, suggestions, limitations, and the myriad related details of the project."

"If a project has not achieved a system architecture, including its rationale, the project should not proceed to full-scale system development. Specifying the architecture as a deliverable enables its use throughout the development and maintenance process."

"Project management is one of those applications everyone talks about but not too many people use."

"A fundamental yet often overlooked principle of successful project management is that you can't do it alone."

"Project management is one of those applications that everyone knows someone else should be using."

"Generally, project management is distinguished from the general management of corporations by the mission- oriented nature of a project. A project organization will generally be terminated when the mission is accomplished"

"Today, the concept behind project management is being applied in such diverse industries and organizations as defense, construction, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, banking, hospitals, accounting, advertising, law, state and local governments, and the United Nations."

"The real key to effective project management is the project network chart. No amount of bells and whistles can compensate for an inefficiently constructed project network."

"Project management is clearly a part of software engineering, and its effective employment plays a major role in reducing the problems associated with delivering software within estimated time and cost."

"Project management is not universally applicable. The utility of the idea depends on the magnitude of the effort, the complexity, the degree of unfamiliarity and interrelatedness, and the concern with the organization's reputation."

"In the past few years, it has been recognized that project management is an identifiable profession — or job category, if you like — requiring specific skills, training, knowledge and even cultivated personality traits."

"Project management is distinguished from production management primarily by the non-repetitive nature of the work denned as a project."

"Project management is needed only for situations which are out of the ordinary; but when the need exists, this may often be the only way by which the task may be handled successfully. These situations require a different attitude on the part of the top management, the undivided attention of a project manager and different methods for control and communications than those used in the normal routine business situation... Pure project management assigns complete responsibility for the task and resources needed for its accomplishment to one project manager. The organization of a large project, though it will be dissolved upon completion of the task, operates for its duration much like a regular division and is relatively independent of any other division or staff group."

"If a high degree of certainty exists concerning all major events, operations, and outcomes, project management is not essential."

"In many ways, project management is similar to functional or traditional management. The project manager, however, may have to accomplish his ends through the efforts of individuals who are paid and promoted by someone else in the chain of command. The pacing factor in acquiring a new plant, in building a bridge, or in developing a new product is often not technology, but management. The technology to accomplish an ad hoc project may be in hand but cannot be put to proper use because the approach to the management is inadequate and unrealistic. Too often this failure can be attributed to an attempt to fit the project to an existing management organization, rather than molding the management to fit the needs of the project. The project manager, therefore, is somewhat of a maverick in the business world. No set pattern exists by which he can operate. His philosophy of management may depart radically from traditional theory."

"The project manager’s staff should be qualified to provide personal administrative and technical support. He should have sufficient authority to increase or decrease his staff as necessary throughout the life of the project. This authorization should include selective augmentation for varying periods of time from the supporting functional areas."

"Basic to successful project management is recognizing when the project is needed — in other words, when to form a project, as opposed to when to use the regular functional organization to do the job. At what point in time do the changes in"

"Project Management is an approach which has been developed and successfully employed for more than a decade to systematically plan and control efforts which have an identifiable end item, the production of which involves complexity, risk and some sort of a fixed deadline."

"The difficulty in project management is how to apply competition between task efforts and between subtask efforts when such things as the task managers' work, schedules, and budgets are all different. Competition is apparent at only the grossest level, between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.; and this competition is too removed, too broad, and full of too many unknown factors to provide an effective day by day incentive to all project personnel."

"Project management is becoming more important as equipment, systems, and projects become more complex."

"The classical vertical arrangement for project management is characterized by an inherent self-sufficiency of operation. It has within its structure all the necessary specialized skills to provide complete engineering capabilities and it also has the ability to carry on its own laboratory investigations, preparation of drawings, and model or prototype manufacture."

"The accuracy of estimates is a function of the stage of development (i.e. estimates improve as development of the item progress). This also means that estimates for development projects representing only 'modest advances' tend to be better than for more ambitious projects."

"Functional people often think that, since project management is primarily an administrative job, loss of a highly technical man to that organization is a loss of resources to the company."

"For the beginning is thought to be more than half the whole."

"Project engineering is the business of building plants — from the preliminary study through the design, procurement, erection and trial operation. It is a problem in management and a business in itself, with its own procedures and its own opportunities for blunder and oversight by the inexperienced... Medium and small size process industry firms almost always, and the all largest sometimes, find it necessary and profitable to engage the service of outside engineers to help with their projects. Project management is the very business of the consulting and engineering company just as the manufacture and sale of certain products is the very business of the process industry firm. The consulting and engineering company is constantly engaged in project management on a variety of jobs and is constantly studying and striving to improve its methods; it is but natural that they bring to the project experience, ability and facilities not possessed by the process industry firm. To the latter, the project is an activity incidental to their main goals. Project management is not part of their main business, and they cannot afford to divert their time and attention from their chief responsibilities, where they are efficient, to the specialized job of project management, where they are likely to be inefficient."

"If a given task depends on the completion of other assignments in other functional areas, and if it will, in turn, affect the cost or timing of subsequent tasks, project management is probably called for"

"Probable impossibilities have to be preferred to improbable possibilities."

"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

"Excellent actions must be good in themselves and good and noble."

"Well begun is half done"

"You will find your vocation where your talents meet opportunity."