Biography of henry gantt for management
Henry Gantt was best known for his planning methodology, the Gantt Chart. This methodology helped him realize major infrastructure projects including the construction of the Hoover Dam in the United States. After obtaining this degree Gantt worked as a teacher until His manager Frederick Taylor involved Gantt in a number of large infrastructure projects.
Together with Taylor, he applied different scientific management principles in order to implement these projects successfully. Henry Gantt worked for Midvale Steel Company until He continued his career as a management consultant and developed his famous planning methodology. He also developed a task and bonus system of wage payment and measurement instruments to provide an insight to worker efficiency and productivity.
In , inspired by Thorsten Veblen, Gantt set up a trade association that was aimed at the development of industrial efficiency within political processes. He created the Gantt chart in the s. 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 and program management.
Gantt is also recognized as an early proponent of the social responsibility of businesses. Gantt was born to a prosperous plantation family in Calvert County, Maryland at the outbreak of the American Civil War. When the war ended the family lost their slaves and land and moved to Baltimore. He subsequently received a Master of Engineering degree in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.
Snow of Fitchburg , Massachusetts on 29 Nov In he joined Frederick W. Taylor , initially as an assistant. Here he began applying scientific management principles to the work at Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel , working there with Taylor until They jointly received six patents and he followed Taylor to Simonds Rolling Company before they went to Bethlehem Steel for a consulting project.
From to Gantt worked as a private consultant to industry on efficiency improvement and was active in promoting scientific management, as Taylor's general approach came to be called. In his later career as an industrial consultant, following the invention of the Gantt chart, he designed the 'task and bonus' system of wage payment and additional measurement methods for worker efficiency and productivity.
In , influenced by Thorsten Veblen Gantt set up the New Machine , an association which sought to apply the criteria of industrial efficiency to the political process. Henry Gantt is listed under Stevens Institute of Technology alumni. Henry Gantt's legacy to project management is the following:. Gantt created many different types of charts. Modern project management software includes this critical function.
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 article, Gantt also describes the use of:.
Biography of henry gantt for management
In his 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.
More generally, he addresses the value of applying scientific analysis to the study of work and labor to develop general laws that can lead to high levels of industrial efficiency. After working in this field until , Gantt decided to pursue a career in consulting. It was during this time that he invented the famous Gantt charts and developed a unique system of wage payment and work efficiency evaluation.
He also introduced the concept of social responsibility in business, which was quite unconventional for its time. The term "Gantt charts" refers to a variety of different diagrams. Gantt was the first to use graphical representation to report progress to management, allowing them to quickly understand the relationship between completed work and planned goals.
Gantt charts proved to be incredibly useful and are now included in almost all project management systems. In his book, "Work, Wages, and Profits," Gantt further developed the idea of work planning, particularly in the organization of assigning new tasks. Scientific management is a theory that analyzes and synthesizes workflows to improve economic efficiency, especially in labor productivity.
It was an early attempt to merge the science of engineering processes with management. It was pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American mechanical engineer. While Gantt charts are named after Henry Gantt, the first Gantt chart was developed by Karol Adamiecki, a Polish engineer, in the mids. It was 15 years later in the s that Henry Gantt created his version of the Gantt chart, one that was widely adopted in Western countries.
Of course, back then Gantt charts were drawn by hand, which was a labor-intensive method. Modern technology has taken the paper Gantt chart and digitized it, adding more functionality and ease of use. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software with Gantt charts that would make Henry Gantt proud. Our Gantt charts are more than horizontal bar charts that organize tasks across project phases.
You can link all four types of task dependencies to avoid delays and filter for the critical path to find essential tasks that must be done to complete the project. Then, set a baseline to capture your project plan and compare it to your actual progress in real time to stay on track. Get started with ProjectManager today for free. Henry Gantt has made a lasting impact on project management.
His Gantt charts are fundamental tools when managing projects, especially in the waterfall methodology. But his business impact goes even further as he was an early proponent of the social responsibility of businesses. Henry Gantt was born in Calvert County, Maryland where his family owned a plantation. This was just as the American Civil War started.
When the Confederacy lost to the Union, his family lost their land and enslaved people. The family then moved to Baltimore. He taught at McDonogh for three years while working on his Master of Engineering degree in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Related: How to Create a Gantt in Excel.