Management is the predominant means in how we run our organisations. It’s been like that since the late 19th century, when we adopted capitalism into our society to cultivate the prosperity & wealth resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Business was getting more complex when it came to all the money we were earning. We needed to learn to manage the growing complexity.
We sharpened the meaning of management over time. Management is essentially the administration of people & resources to achieve the goals of the enterprise. Managers represented the ownership of enterprises, whether they were the stockholders of corporations, partners of firms, or the proprietors of small businesses. Whereas the role of the owners is to lead, or at least provide direction, managers do the job of planning, organising, directing, & controlling. Managers are the procurers of resources, the representative negotiators, the disciplinarians, and the planners & implementors of strategy.
We’ve applied management to our supply chains in the same way we applied it to all other business functions. We set goals, defined performance standards, and ran after our people to accomplish & comply with them.
We learned, however, that we could do only so much in managing supply chains. We can only do so much with existing supply chain structures & systems. If we are to improve supply chains, we needed to re-engineer them, as in either replace parts of them, or rebuild all of them.
We engage engineers for projects which require scientific & technical prowess. It’s been argued that we as managers don’t have the expertise to change systems or structures.
Many of us who are managers have degrees in engineering, and those of us who do have exercised our engineering talents in our day-to-day jobs. But our scopes of work as managers, what with all the pressures and distractions, make it difficult for us to double as engineers.
Yet, we try. Not only because we have the educational backgrounds, but because our superiors expect us to do so. As much as management is about planning, organising, directing, & controlling, our superiors also expect us to improve the systems & structures we oversee. It doesn’t matter if it’s not exactly specified in our contracts or job descriptions, our superiors expect us to initiate & make better what we manage.
Engineering is the application of scientific & technical knowledge to the design, development, & establishment of systems & structures. In short, engineers are problem solvers and builders.
There are a multitude of engineering disciplines. Civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical, industrial, nuclear, environmental, petroleum, software, aeronautical, just to name a few.
Most, if not all, engineering disciplines take off from the natural sciences. And all engineers apply a lot of mathematics in their work. Mechanical, civil, & electrical engineers apply the principles of Physics. Chemical, petroleum, & metallurgical engineers build from the science of chemistry. Environmental & biomedical engineers take off from biology and the medical sciences.
For many of us, who are engineers by degree, we try to apply our engineering education when we became managers. We try to apply science in how we improve our operations. We try to be scientific in solving problems, especially supply chain problems.
And we learned that we can’t. And why we can’t is because our roles as managers require us to spend much of our time in:
- Planning: e.g., developing strategies, defining objectives;
- Organising: e.g., listing priorities, making & filing reports, ensuring proper housekeeping;
- Directing: e.g. communicating & delegating assignments, clarifying roles, setting work pace targets;
- Controlling: e.g., addressing deviations, enforcing discipline.
Doing these basic tasks of management doesn’t give us much time to solve problems. And that is also because problem solving is a big task. We can try to be engineers, but we learn by experience that it’s not simply part of our scope.
Problem solving is the engineer’s job. And engineers do it by the following basic tasks:
- Designing: i.e., defining the problem, establishing criteria, identifying candidates as options for the solution;
- Development: e.g., drafting the design, building & testing prototypes, experimenting with options, determining costs & benefits, selecting & proposing the solution;
- Installation: e.g., drafting the detailed design specifications, scheduling & executing trials, troubleshooting, deployment, go live, writing the manual;
Engineering by itself is a full time job much different from management. Even as much as we want to be both managers and engineers, we can’t.
Managers plan, organise, direct, & control. Engineers design, develop, & install. Managers oversee and administer. Engineers solve problems.
We can be engineers by education but we can’t manage & engineer at the same time.
Ellery's Essays 