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Modern methods of managing people and what is now called project controls emerged during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries by, unarguably, the work of two pioneering men and their followers: Frederick W. Taylor and Henry L. Gantt. Both men were mechanical engineers who studied theory but both believed in actual experience as well as data to develop the concept of what became known as "scientific management." Studying work and tasks to determine the "best way" was a novel concept in US business and industry during the late 19th century. Taylor and Gantt discovered that the old way of doing things didn't always apply.
This period was an era of rapid economic advancement and industrial expansion in the US in conjunction with advances in science and progressive thought. The US was rapidly becoming a world military superpower during this period which required advanced industrial and management techniques.
Taylor's and Gantt's contributions were considered controversial and even radical but their work influences us even to this day. They truly laid the foundations for our methods of planning and execution of work.
Up until Taylor's time, industrial processes and the management of them were influenced by the US ideals of freedom and democracy as espoused by Thomas Jefferson. In Jefferson's world, the US was a democratic land of a small federal government. Businesses were small and independent: the land of the yeoman farmer or craftsman toiling away at his workshop bench. The great late 19th century economic growth, especially in heavy industries such as railroads and steel and the US federal government - the US Army and Navy, quickly left Jefferson's idealized America behind. American business and industry's expansion, fueled even further by the Civil and Spanish American Wars, required a different economic model. Taylor and his associates, especially Gantt, quickly met this need for a new way of doing things. Their ideas were translated and adopted by businesses and governments in many countries, even in the emerging Soviet Union after the First World War.
Taylor was most famous for introducing the concept of studying and planning work to seek ways to do it faster and cheaper. He believed that the old way and durations of tasks were not necessarily the best...