WHO WAS HENRY GANTT?

FELLOWS HAVE GIVEN EXCEPTIONAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROFESSION. HEAR FROM A SELECT FEW HERE EACH QUARTER.

It may seem like a rhetorical question, given that most of us are familiar with the eponymous chart that is widely used in project scheduling. But who was Gantt, the person? And how did that chart come into being?

Henry Laurence Gantt was born in 1861, the offspring of plantation owners in Calvert County, MD, in north-eastern USA. The family later moved to Baltimore, having lost their land after the civil war ended.

Gantt graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1880, took up teaching for three years, and then received a Master of Mechanical Engineering degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

Gantt began work as a draughtsman in Baltimore in 1884. He teamed up with Frederick Taylor in 1887 and worked with him on scientific management principles in steel foundries until 1893.

Taylor and Gantt both realised that, for greater workplace efficiencies, mechanical tasks needed to be broken down into smaller components for optimal performance levels. Taylor developed his Four Principles of Scientific Management, known as “Taylorism” and based on his time and motion studies that standardised and simplified tasks to increase production.

Henry Gantt was more interested in motivating workers to achieve greater production efficiencies and urging businesses to accept greater social responsibilities. He outlined his principles and methods in three culturally significant management books: Work, Wages, and Profits (1910), Industrial Leadership (1916), and Organising for Work (1919).

H. L. Gantt.

(Source: en.wikedia.org)

An early Gantt Chart.

(Source: Clark, Wallace 1922, The Gantt Chart, p. 86)

In his books, he expressed concern about the expense associated with idle labour and idle capital, both of which were pertinent at any time but even more so in the middle of World War 1. Bar charts had by then been in use for over a hundred years, and he used them together with tables and line graphs as tools to measure efficiencies of men and machines in production systems, especially in steel foundries and machine shops.

His books also contained many forthright statements on human resource management, some of which have echoed down the years. For instance, in Organising for Work he stated: “Our most serious trouble is incompetency in high places. As long as that remains uncorrected, no efficiency in the workmen will avail very much”.

The many charts that Gantt developed fell roughly into three classes: Man and Machine Record Charts, Layout and Load Charts, and Progress Charts. Of these, his Progress Charts are of most, albeit minor, relevance to the single chart in his name that we use today.

Gantt never sought to patent or copyright any of the charts or tables that he developed, and he freely distributed them to anyone who needed them. Each of his charts was named according to its purpose, and none of them bore his name. That was left to a fellow engineer, Wallace Clark, whose book The Gantt Chart: A Working Tool of Management was first published in 1922.

Although the title of Clark’s book seemingly referred to a single chart it was actually a collective noun for the whole gamut of Gantt’s charts. Clark’s succinct summary of the Progress Chart in 1922 was:

The Gantt Progress Chart, as developed from this early form, was found to help in the making of definite plans and to be highly effective in getting those plans executed. The rate at which the work goes forward is continuously compared with the advance of time, which induces action to accelerate or retard that rate.

Henry Laurence Gantt, A.B., M.E. died on 23 November 1919. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers posthumously awarded him the initial Henry Laurence Gantt Medal in 1929, an award in his honour that continues annually. The award is bestowed for continuous achievement in management and service to the community, reflecting Gantt’s seminal work in production industries based on improvements in efficiencies and social responsibilities.

His best-known legacy, the chart that bears his name but which is radically different in both form and function from his originals, is still in daily use for project scheduling worldwide. Gantt’s books, and the book by Clark, have now been digitised and are in the public domain. They make for interesting reading today. Somewhat appropriately, the digitising of Clark’s book The Gantt Chart was financed by Microsoft.

Author: Don Coutts FAIPM, CPPD, M.Ed, Dip.PM has worked for 40 years in a number of agencies in the Australian Public Service which included managing projects in Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Russia, and the Antarctic. He now works as a trainer and assessor, as well as a mentor, for the next generation of project managers.