HENRY

LAURENCE
GANTT
AND
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
 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.