Modular Organization System Design
By: Steve Smith
I propose that there be a field called "Scientific Management" and that Dr. Deming be considered the founder of the field. It would be good to have a Journal of Scientific Management.
Dr. Deming considered the concept of a system to be fundamental in Scientific Management. An organization is a system and systems can be designed, developed and improved. Dr. Deming recommended system diagrams to show the processes and their relationships in an organization. The purpose of drawing these diagrams is to optimize the system and find any problems. As I understand though these are often drawn as a single giant diagram. I have previously worked as a software analyst/programmer (C language), and there are some similiarities in software system design and organization system design.
It was realized soon after the advent of computer programming that writing single giant programs made it very difficult to understaand an entire program. The concept of structured programming was developed and in general it is standard to write software systems as a set of functions or subroutines. Each function should generally if at all possible not be more than 1 page. A fundamental tenet of structured programming is to never use "goto". Code must be structured. Inputs and outputs are stated, and it is a manageable "chunk" that can be studied and understood separately. The main program should also be not more than 1 page and should show at a very high level what that particular software suite does. This main program will contain functions that are called and which then develop more detail, and call more functions to further develop the detail of the software. More recently the concept of object-oriented programming has been developed.
A similiar approach could be used for organization system design, except diagrams are used. A master diagram could show at a very high and gereral level what a company does. It would contain boxes or circles etc. and arrows. Then for each box or circle there could be another diagram on a separate page to show in more detail what that module did. Further breakdown of the processes could be done successively in this way on separate pages. In fact it could break down to diagrams showing particular teams and the relationships between them, and finally diagrams each on separate pages for each particular team, stating who is in the team, what they do, the inputs and outputs for the team, what other teams they interact with and any other relevant information. Software analysts/programmers could be consulted to assist in development of these system diagrams.