Gantt Charts Online
Henry Laurence Gantt was an American management consultant and mechanical engineer who was involved in the development of the scientific management. He created the Gantt chart in the 1910s that was employed on the major infrastructure projects including the Interstate highway and the Hoover Dam system. It still continues to be an important tool widely used in the program management and the project management.
In 1884 Henry Laurence Gantt began working as a draughtsman at the machine-shop named “Poole and Hunt” in Baltimore. In 1887 he started applying the scientific management principles to the work at Bethlehem Steel and Midvale Steel, working there with Taylor until 1893. In his later career as a management consultant, Henry Laurence Gantt following the invention of the Gantt chart designed the so-called “task and bonus” system of the wage payment as well as the additional measurement methods worker productivity and efficiency.
Influenced by Thorsten Veblen in 1916 Gantt set up the so-called “New Machine” that was known to be an association which sought to apply the criteria of the industrial efficiency to the political process. Together with the Marxist Walter Polakov, Henry Gantt led a breakaway from the 1916 ASME conference to call for socializing the industrial production under the control of the managers who were incorporating the Polakov's analysis of inefficiency.
Henry Gantt is listed under the Stevens’ Institute of Technology alumni and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers published his biography in 1934 awarding an annual medal in his honor.
Henry Gantt's legacy to project management includes not only the previously mentioned Gantt chart which is still accepted as an important management tool, providing a graphic schedule for controlling work, its planning, as well as recording any progress towards the stages of the projects, but also other terms, such as social responsibility of business, industrial efficiency, and Task and Bonus System.
Due to the social responsibility of business, he believed that all the businesses have their own obligations to the welfare of the society where they operate. Also, he insisted on the industrial efficiency being only produced by the application of the scientific analysis to all the aspects of the work in progress. The industrial management role includes improving the system by eliminating accidents and chance. Talking about the Task and Bonus System, he linked the bonus that can be paid to the managers to how good they do their job teaching their employees to improve the needed performance.
Pic 1. Gantt Charts Online
Henry Gantt created lots of different types of charts in order for the supervisors to quickly get to know whether production is on schedule, behind the schedule or ahead of it. Modern project management software ConceptDraw PROJRCT Server includes this critical function allowing all the project managers follow the status of each of the task seeing whether it is already complete, half-way done or not even started to be worked on.
Gantt described two types of balances, first of which is known as the "man’s record", showing what each of the workers should do and did, and second - the "daily balance of work", showing the amount of work that still has to be done and the one that is done.
Giving the examples of the orders that may require many days to complete, Gantt introduced such term as the “daily balance” that has rows for each of the days whether they are working or non-working, as well as columns, for each of the operations. At the top of each of the columns, there is the amount that needs achieving. The entered in each appropriate cell amount is simply the number of the parts that are being done on a daily basis as well as the cumulative total for that part.
The heavy horizontal lines within the Gantt chart are known to be used as the indicators representing the starting date as well as the date by which some particular order should be done. According to Henry Gantt, the daily balance illustrated in a graphical way is a method of recording and scheduling work. The so-called “production cards" is another well-known term for assigning work to each of the operators working within some team and recording how much is done every day.
The Gantt chart has a modern variation known to be a Program Evaluation and Review Technique. PERT is a method of analyzing the tasks which are involved in completing some project. The time needed for completing each of the tasks is very important to keep an eye on the executors who are involved in the projects in order to find out if they meet the clients’ requirements about the products and/or services the company offers.
One of the main project managers’ responsibilities is to identify the minimum time that is needed for complete the whole project. Making it possible to schedule a project not knowing all the details in advance for sure as well as setting the durations of all the activities can be a great challenge for any project manager. This event-oriented technique is commonly used in such projects where time is the main factor. Applying it to very large-scale, complex, non-routine, one-time infrastructure as well as the Research and Development projects may be a good option.
Being a useful management tool, Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) relies upon the node and arrow diagrams of events and activities when arrows represent the work or the activities that are necessary for reaching the events or nodes which indicate each of the completed phases of the project in total.
Both PERT and CPM which is a critical path method are complementary tools. When critical path method employs the so-called “one-time estimate” as well as “one-cost estimate” for each of the activities, PERT may utilize all “three-time estimates” (pessimistic, optimistic and expected), but no costs for the activities. PERT is known to be applied increasingly to all critical path scheduling within the teams in many different organizations.