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The best way to understand the meaning of planning in the perspective of scientific management, is to follow Taylor (1998, p.17): “The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. And the work planned in advance in this way constitutes a task which is to be solved, as explained above, not by the workman alone, but in almost all cases by the joint effort of the workman and the management. This task specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it”.
During Taylor’s time industrial production was in its beginning and workers performed mostly physical activities. They had no technical education and there was no job training. In these conditions, management played a very important role in planning and organizing the whole production process. Planning was done for each activity, according to its specificity and was supposed to go down to details. The worker became a simple executive, following strictly the given instructions. Planning was done for short periods of time and took into consideration the necessary resources, the difficulty of the task and the necessary motion sequences. Later on, Gantt introduced a bar diagram to schedule all elementary activities in their succession. This kind of planning is a rather simple activity performed by the management, at the job level and with all execution details. It is a deterministic activity which must be executed by the worker, without any personal interpretation and thinking co ...