Production management courses are often the repository for some of the most inappropriate and intellectually stultifying materials to be found in the business curriculum... many faculty members have little respect for such courses... and students complained more strongly to us about the pointlessness of the production requirement than of any other.
These ideas of planning [by dictators and would-be dictators] go back to Plato’s treatise on the form of the commonwealth. Plato was very outspoken. He planned a system ruled exclusively by philosophers. He wanted to eliminate all individual rights and decisions. Nobody should go anywhere, rest, sleep, eat, drink, wash, unless he was told to do so.
Project management is distinguished from production management primarily by the non-repetitive nature of the work denned as a project.