Managing People or Managing Production

If you were about to choose, what would you prefer to manage, people or the production? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each management?

I have tried managing people already and it is really hard to manage them when they have no respect to you.

The advantage of people management is that they can take intructions and then they can do it on their own. But sometimes they will not do as you expected them to do.

On the other hand, managing the productions or the machines that work on the production will really give you the exact result that you wanted. But when you want to give instructions or change the production of the machine, you will have to reprogram it or even buy parts to make the needed job to be done.

Managing the production is easier, I am not good at relations..:(

I have a development team and want to set standards of work, programming, back up, server management, etc policies I´m a Marketing Person so, do not know about technology standards can you give me a little help what can i read, where can i find some help or a guideline to have this done?