Henry Gantt

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Henry Laurence Gantt

Born 1861
Died November 23, 1919
Citizenship United States
Fields Scientific management
Known for Gantt chart

Henry Laurence Gantt, A.B., M.E. (1861 – 23 November 1919) was an American
mechanical engineer and management consultant who is most famous for developing the
Gantt chart in the 1910s.

These Gantt charts were employed on major infrastructure projects including the Hoover
Dam and Interstate highway system and continue to be an important tool in project
management.[1]

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Biography
• 2 Work
o 2.1 Gantt charts
• 3 See also
 • 4 Publications

• 5 References

[edit] Biography
Gantt was born in Calvert County, Maryland. He graduated from McDonogh 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.[2]

[edit] Work
Henry Gantt's legacy to production management is the following:

• The Gantt chart: Still accepted as an important management tool today, it

provides a graphic schedule for the planning and controlling of work, and
recording progress towards stages of a project. The chart has a modern variation,
Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).
• Industrial Efficiency: Industrial efficiency can only be produced by the
application of scientific analysis to all aspects of the work in progress. The
industrial management role is to improve the system by eliminating chance and
accidents.
• The Task And Bonus System: He linked the bonus paid to managers to how well
they taught their employees to improve performance.
• The social responsibility of business: He believed that businesses have obligations
to the welfare of the society in which they operate.

[edit] Gantt charts

Main article: Gantt chart

Gantt created many different types of charts.[3] 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:[4]

• 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" [5] 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" [6] 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.[7][8]

[edit] See also

• Henry Laurence Gantt Medal
• Human factors
• Karol Adamiecki
• Scheduling
• Gantt chart

[edit] Publications
Gantt published several articles and books, a selection:

• 1916. Work, Wages, and Profits, second edition, Engineering Magazine Co., New
York.
• 1919. Organizing for Work, Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, New York.