Posted by George Huhn on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 @ 12:54 PM
The Gantt chart was introduced to the world by Henry Laurence Gantt between 1910 and 1915. He described his invention quite simply in his book Organizing for Work published in 1919:
"…the following principles upon which this chart system is founded are easily comprehended:
First: The fact that all activities can be measured by the amount of time needed to perform them.
Second: The space representing the time unit on the chart can be made to represent the amount of activity which should have taken place in that time."
In addition to inventing this staple of project management, Organizing for Work shows that Gantt was a strong proponent of social responsibility for engineers and industry and the idea of an honest and democratic workplace:
"Industrial control is too often based on favoritism or privilege, rather than on ability. This hampers the healthy, normal development of industrialism, which can reach its highest development only when equal opportunity is secured to all, and when all reward is equitably proportioned to service rendered. In other words, when industry becomes democratic." (Organizing for Work, 1919)
"The business system must accept its social responsibility and devote itself primarily to service, or the community will ultimately make the attempt to take it over in order to operate it in its own interest. (Organizing for Work, 1919)
Doesn't that last quote sound a little bit like it came from the current healthcare reform debate?
I also thought that it would be great if these words from Gantt were hung in a prominent place in every project and project portfolio management office:
"First: We have no right morally to decide as a matter of opinion that which can be determined as a matter of fact.
Second: If we allow ourselves to be governed by opinion where it is possible to obtain facts, we shall lose in our competition with those who base their actions on facts.
The substitution of fact for opinion is the basis of modern industrial progress, and the rate of this progress is controlled by the extent to which the methods of scientific investigation supplant the debating society methods in determining a basis for action." (Organizing for Work, 1919)
The Henry Laurence Gantt Medal was established in 1929 by the American Society Of Mechanical Engineers is given for "distinguished achievement in management and for service to the community."
Mr. Gantt is one of those people that I like to imagine what more he might have done had computers been around when he was!
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Posted by George Huhn on Thu, Dec 10, 2009 @ 02:02 PM
Good project execution is essential to achieving the strategic goals of a company, but most companies either don't measure it or don't measure it well.
In companies where the quality of project management execution is assessed at all, it is usually measured against meeting budget, timing, and resource objectives that were often ill-conceived to start with. So when projects go over budget or are under resourced or when timelines are missed, it is too often blamed on "execution," and rarely on the poor quality of the initial budget, timing, resource, and risk assessments (or lack thereof).
How often have you seen managers record a quantitative basis for their planning estimates at the beginning of a project and then assess them at the end of a project?
Too often managers look at Gantt charts as if they are THE PROJECT PLAN carved in stone. They aren't. Most of the time, Gantt charts represent the best guesses of well-intentioned people who tend to underestimate risks, resources, and timing (because that is what human beings tend to do). Most of the time, the "data" used to support the project planning either doesn't exist, hasn't been checked, or hasn't been derived empirically. Task start and end dates are fixed with virtually no meaningful or quantitative discussion about the probabilities of meeting those dates or modeling the dramatic cumulative effects of small amounts of slippage on project value.
A big contributor to those results may not be just poor project execution, but how and where the project finish lines were drawn at the start of the project. So it is past the time for managers to be measuring the quality of project execution based on chiseled-in-stone Gantt charts.
Instead, today's managers need to start using quantitative risk analyses, databases of empirical data from previous experiences, and statistical tools for probabilistic project planning so they can truly assess and improve the quality of project execution.
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® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.