HENRY LAURENCE

GANTTAND

HIS THEORY

WHO IS HENRY

LAURENCE GANTT?

HENRY LAURENCE GANTT

Born: 1861

Died: November 23, 1919

Citizenship: United States

Fields: Scientific management

Known for: Gantt chart

Gantt was born in Calvert County, Maryland. He graduated from McDonough School in 1878 and then

went on to Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

He then worked as a teacher and draughtsman before becoming a mechanical engineer. In 1887, he joined

Frederick W. Taylor in applying scientific management principles to their work at Midvale Steel and Bethlehem

Steel—working there with Taylor until 1893. In his later career as a management consultant—following the invention of the Gantt chart—he also

designed the 'task and bonus' system of wage payment and additional measurement methods worker efficiency

and productivity.Henry Gantt is listed under Stevens Institute of

Technology alumni.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) awards an annual medal in honor of Henry Laurence

Gantt.

History of Project Management –

The Work of Henry L. Gantt

Most project managers are familiar with Gantt charts, but most do not know much about the

man who originally created them. Henry L. Gantt, A.B., M.E. (1861 - 23 November 1919) was

a mechanical engineer and management consultant at the turn of the century.

He developed the Gantt chart during the first decade of the 1900′s. Interestingly enough, he

was born and raised in Maryland, ultimately attending Johns Hopkins University. He and

Frederick W. Taylor worked for Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel, using scientific management

principles to increase productivity.

The Gantt chart was based on Gantt’s work in the shipbuilding industry during WWI. It

changed the way work was managed.

The Gantt chart was used to schedule and monitor large construction projects like the Hoover Dam

started in 1931 and the Eisenhower highway network launched in 1956. It has been refined and used ever

since and is a powerful graphic tool to illustrate project schedule and progress.

Henry L. Gantt also contributed to the concept of Industrial Efficiency, by applying scientific analysis to

all aspects of the work in progress. The industrial management role is to improve the system by eliminating chance and accidents. His concept of the Task and Bonus System linked the

bonus paid to managers and employees to how well they improve performance.

Henry L. Gantt also believed that businesses have a social responsibility to promote the welfare of the

society in which they operate.

THE GANTT CHARTS

Gantt created many different types of charts. He designed his charts so that foremen or other supervisors could quickly know whether production was on schedule, ahead of schedule, or behind schedule. Modern project

management software includes this critical function even now.

Gantt (1903) describes two types of balances:

the "man’s record", which shows what each worker should do and did do, and

the "daily balance of work", which shows the amount of work to be done and the amount that is done.

Gantt gives an example with orders that will require many days to complete.

The daily balance has rows for each day and columns for each part or each operation. At the top of each column is

the amount needed. The amount entered in the appropriate cell is the number of parts done each day

and the cumulative total for that part. Heavy horizontal lines indicate the starting date and the date that the

order should be done. According to Gantt, the graphical daily balance is "a method of scheduling and recording work". In this 1903 article, Gantt also describes the use

of:"production cards" for assigning work to each operator

and recording how much was done each day.

In his 1916 book "Work, Wages, and Profits" Gantt explicitly discusses scheduling, especially in the job

shop environment. He proposes giving to the foreman each day an "order of work" that is an ordered list of jobs to be done that day. Moreover, he discusses the

need to coordinate activities to avoid "interferences". However, he also warns that the most elegant

schedules created by planning offices are useless if they are ignored, a situation that he observed.

In his 1919 book "Organizing for Work" Gantt gives two principles for his charts:

one, measure activities by the amount of time needed to complete them;

two, the space on the chart can be used to represent the amount of the activity that should have been done

in that time.

Gantt shows a progress chart that indicates for each month of the year, using a thin horizontal line, the number of items produced during that month. In

addition, a thick horizontal line indicates the number of items produced during the year.

Each row in the chart corresponds to an order for parts from a specific contractor, and each row indicates the starting month and ending month of the deliveries. It is the closest thing to the Gantt charts typically used today in scheduling systems,

though it is at a higher level than machine scheduling.Gantt’s machine record chart and man record chart are quite similar, though they show both the actual working time for

each day and the cumulative working time for a week.

Each row of the chart corresponds to an individual machine or operator. These charts do not indicate which tasks were to be

done, however.A novel method of displaying interdependencies of processes to increase visibility of production schedules was invented in

1896 by Karol Adamiecki, which was similar to the one defined by Gantt in 1903. However, Adamiecki did not publish his works in a language popular in the West; hence Gantt was

able to popularize a similar method, which he developed around the years 1910–1915, and the solution became

attributed to Gantt. With minor modifications, what originated as the Adamiecki's chart is now more commonly referred to as

the Gantt Chart.

Gant Chart for project planning and scheduling

Use Gantt chart at project scheduling stage to

• Assess time characteristics to a project • Show the task order • Define resources involved • Show links between scheduled tasks

Use Gantt chart at project planning stage to

• Monitor project completion • Display the results of correctional activities • Show links between scheduled tasks

What Work Henry Gantt Did

For Scientific Management?

Henry L. Gantt (1861-1919) worked with Frederick Taylor on scientific management experiments over the course of

14 years, before striking out on his own as a management consultant. He originated a unique pay

arrangement in which all workers were entitled to a basic daily wage, compared with Taylor's differential piece rate

pay system, which paid according to output. In Gantt's task and bonus system, if employees completed their

tasks on time they earned a bonus, and if they performed beyond expectations they were again rewarded, as were their supervisors. Gantt wanted to encourage supervisors

to coach employees rather than drive them to perform. Productivity doubled in some organizations after

management instituted this pay system, reinforcing Gantt's belief that humanitarian management was the

key to achieving organizational goals.

More recently, F. Kenneth Iverson, CEO of the steelmaker Nucor, has initiated a base wage system with bonuses tied to productivity. The base hourly wage is about $8, and bonuses are paid on employees' ability to turn out

products in less than the standard time. Employees are very productive and are paid accordingly in an average week, the bonus makes up more than half

of a typical employee's paycheck. Another Gantt innovation was a chart to compare actual output to

expected output over time, a useful tool for planning and control functions.