Henry Gantt impact on project management
No discussion on the beginnings of project management would be complete without mentioning the contribution to the field by Henry Gantt. Gantt himself was an associate of Frederick Taylor in the late 1890s and he first documented the idea that work could be envisioned as a defined series of smaller tasks. Gantt
was influenced in his view through involvement in Navy ship construction during World War I. A concise explanation of Gantt’s contribution comes from the Gantt Group’s document “Who was Henry Gantt?” (Gantt Group, 2003). It states, “He broke down all the tasks in the ship construction process and diagrammed them using the now familiar grid, bars and milestones.” This familiar time grid is now called the Gantt chart. It remains today the most used planning and control document in industry after more than 100years.
Note that the Gantt chart defines tasks and times through the use of horizontal bars. The completed chart provides an overall view of the timeline and tasks needed to complete the project. The appearance and use of this format chart has many variants, but the basic idea has changed little since its conception. We will see more of this chart later in a modern context. Learn more about project Managment by clicking here.
Mary Parker Follett impact on project management
With the increased study of work processes and methodologies, industries began looking more at how to do the work than who was doing the work. Mary Parker Follett stepped out from behind scientific management theory and changed the focus more on the human element. She opposed Taylor’s lack of specific attention to human needs and relationships in the work place (Ivancevich et al., 2008, p. 13). From this action, Follett takes the honour for spawning the behavioural side of management and was one of the first management theorists to take this view. Follett focused on the divisions between management and workers: more specifically, the role of management instructing workers on what was to be done and how it was to be done. Follett believed that each worker had something to contribute and the amount of knowledge held by workers was not being tapped. She believed that it would benefit the workplace and all of society if instead of working as individuals or separate groups that these groups or individuals worked as a whole, so the modern view of teams was now part of the equation, although without an operational theory to support it. Treating workers as something other than a means to get the task done was a concept that was counter to the Taylor school of thought. Gabor in her book The Capitalist Philosophers states that Follett’s ideas came to be embraced by the most forward-looking management thinkers of her time, many of them also admirers of scientific management. Ironically, Follett’s views of focusing on the worker would be accidentally validated in the future from the classic scientific management oriented Hawthorne experiment.
Elton Mayo influence on project management
The evolution of scientific management principles continued into the mid-1920s, following the concepts laid down by Taylor and his disciples. This area of study had attracted its share of detractors, such as Mary Parker Follett, but the visible quantification related to the scientific approach also attracted many to that school of thought. The Taylorites saw the factory as a complex set of processes that needed to be optimized and taught to the worker. Eldon Mayo and his research team followed that general principle in believing that one of the keys to improving productivity lay in improving the physiological environment of the worker. Looking back, we see elements from both the Taylor and Follett schools of thought in this view. At any rate, this premise led to what is known as the famous Hawthorne experiments (Gabor, 1999, p. 85). The Hawthorne experiments were conducted by Mayo and his team from around 1927 to 1932 in Cicero, Illinois at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works. These experiments were designed to examine physical and environmental influences (e.g., brightness of lights, humidity, etc.) on worker productivity. Later versions of this effort moved into the more psychological aspects to include work breaks, group pressure, working hours, and managerial leadership (Envison, n.d.). The initial studies focused on the effect that changing light intensity might have on productivity. The results of this experiment were initially very confusing to the cause-and-effect-oriented researchers. They observed that an increase in light intensity corresponded to an increase in worker output; however, as the lighting decreased, productivity continued to show an increase. The puzzled researchers wondered what outside variables had not been considered and set about laying out a second cause-and-effect experiment in the relay assembly process. The relay assembly control test room was set up to measure the productivity of workers under a myriad of changing conditions. Despite varying worker environmental conditions regarding work break durations and length of the work day, output continued to rise regardless of the change. This simply did not fit the Scientific Management principles of cause and effect. Eventually, analysis of this set of experiments would open the door wide in understanding some initial concepts related to worker motivation. In these experiments, essentially none of the chosen test variables were responsible for the worker behavior. It took more analysis before a cause-and-effect relationship was determined and this changed the field of modern management. In the aftermath of the Hawthorne experiments, interviews were held with the test subjects. The results showed that the participants had formed their own social network that was different from the norm on the factory floor. Later analysis concluded that the test subjects felt as though they belonged to something special by being a part of the experiments. They were special because someone was paying attention to them. As a result of this new feeling, they wanted to produce like special workers should. In actuality, the group was purposefully randomly selected and was no more special than the hundreds of other workers outside of the control room. The conclusion now known as the Hawthorne Effect is described in the article “The Hawthorne Effect—Mayo Studies Motivation” (Envison, n.d.). The results of these studies formed the basis for the foundation of what is the modern-day behavior school of management.