Administration and Control (Byte Size Skills Course)

Administration and Control Course
What do you think of when someone says the word "management" Perhaps you think of a factory with employees toiling away on the "shop floor" watched over and directed by the "management" in their white coats or pinstripe suits from their offices "upstairs"; or a design department with managers acting as a focus of co-ordination for specialised design activities carried out by "colleagues"
Many people have these sorts of images. Whether our experience of management is good or bad, we tend to assume that work has always been like it is today. We take for granted that organisations have people who report to others in an ordered hierarchical structure; that in the workplace there are laid down policies and procedures; that an attempt is made to define and solve problems systematically; that people are hired and promoted on merit and that attempts are made to motivate the organisation's employees. In short, we tend to regard management as a well established discipline which has been in its present form for many years.
In fact, the art of management as we know it today is vastly different from that of 100 years ago. Although we can say that management of some form must have existed to enable the planning, organising, leading and control of the work situation, we can also say that our general understanding of management has been lacking and ad hoc in the past. It is only relatively recently that concerted attempts have been made to analyse management as a separate function and to attempt systematically to improve output in the workplace by attention to it. Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were theories developed of how production processes and business organisation might be systematically managed. In this course, we consider and review some of the earliest of these theories, and their impacts, past and present. of the Gilbreths and Gantt.
highlight scientific management...