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Henry
L. Gantt
A Retrospective view of his work.
"Insanity:
doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results."
Albert
Einstein.
Keywords: Schedule, control, Gantt Charts.
Henry L. Gantt - A Retrospective view of his work [P158]
The importance of Henry Gantt to the development of project managment and modern business managment cannot be understated. However, his contribution was not associated with developing what the modern workd calls 'Gantt Charts' - this type of chart pre-dates Gantt by more than a century; he is famous for the wrong reasons!
Gantt
did not invent simple bar charts that show the time work is planned to
occur – these were invented more than 100 years before
Gantt’s work (see: A
Brief History of Scheduling)
and were in regular but often ineffective use in the manufacturing
plant's Gantt helped: “Many
shops
have a very nice schedule system; they plan their work
beautifully—at least, it looks very pretty on paper; but they
have no means of finding out whether those schedules are lived up to or
not.”
Gantt’s focus was on increased production, through the use of
effective measurement and planning. The charts he used (there were many
different types) were only a means to an end: “The man who
undertakes to introduce scientific management and pins his faith to
rules, and the use of forms and blanks, without thoroughly
comprehending the principles upon which it is based, will fail. Forms
and blanks are simply the means to an end. If the end is not kept
clearly in mind, the use of these forms and blanks is apt to be
detrimental rather than beneficial.”
The innovations introduced by Gantt in the early 1900s, that are still
very much the focus of modern project management included team
motivation, change management and the effective use of control
systems. Whilst the focus of his work was in manufacturing,
with the advantage of repetition and standardisation, many of his ideas
and processes are still valuable in today’s projects.
Henry Gantt’s standout contribution was his innovative
approach to workforce management, today we would call this 'team'
management; overlaid with a strong sense of industrial democracy. It
was focused on the efficient utilization of labour and a fair division
of the rewards from any improvement in productivity between the workers
and the owners of the factories.
The starting point of Gantt’s work was the ideas of
scientific management introduced by Frederic Taylor. The best way to
understand a complex task is to break it down into its component parts,
scientifically study and optimise each part and then synthesise the
optimum way to complete the work from the optimised parts. What made
Gantt’s work uniquely valuable was the way this information
was used to motivate workers. His method involved scientific
investigation and careful standardization of the work into tasks. Once
a task had been set, individual instruction was provided to each
worker, and once they had learnt to perform the task in the set time
and to the required quality, a bonus was paid in addition to their
daily wage. Gantt recognised incentives are a far more powerful
motivator then penalties. He described his approach as a system of
education for the workforce, with a bonus for those who learned! It
proved highly effective generated sustained productivity improvements
well in excess of 100%.
His system also interconnected the reward paid to the supervisor with
the rewards paid to the workers. The foreman received a bonus for each
worker in his team that received a bonus, but the foreman’s
bonus was doubled if all of the workers in his team achieved a
bonus. This encouraged the foreman to work with and support
the least effective members of ‘the team’ to bring
everyone up to standard. Importantly whenever a bonus was not earned,
the cause was investigated and the cause of the failure removed or
remedied, Gantt wanted everyone to make their bonus every day! When
this was achieved, the plant as a whole was working to its optimum
productivity and generating the maximum profits; a win-win outcome.
When introducing his system to a new factory, Gantt recognized that a “system of
management requires all of its parts to work in harmony if it is to be
effective” and
that “in
every workroom there is a fashion, a habit of work, and every new
worker follows that fashion, for it isn't respectable not
to.”
Consequently, “the changing
of a system of management is a very serious matter and cannot be done
by a superintendent in his spare time.”
Gantt recognised the change needed to introduce a new system requires a
high degree of skill, takes time and needs planning! The challenge is
getting senior management to actively support the change that brings
better systems into use to the
benefit of the organisation. This paper looks at the real contributions
Henry Gantt
made and consider them in the modern context. Unfortunately many of the
problems and issues Gantt identified are still present in many
organisations and still prevent the achievement of optimal production
outcomes!
Author:
Patrick Weaver
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Download Paper after publication |
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| Useful
references; Henry Gantt's books: - Work Wages & Profits - Organizing for Work - The Gantt chart a working tool of management (Wallace Clark) The 1910 Schürch barchart: - Published article (German language see p233 & 234 for diagrams) - Translated comments on the schedule |
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