Project Work, Gantt Charts and Work 5.0

When work is not repetitive, how do we optimise the workflow and reduce waste?

Henry Gantt was a contemporary and colleague of FW Taylor [The father of Scientific Management]. In 1887 Gantt joined Taylor in applying Scientific Management principles at Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel. He worked there with Taylor until 1893. It was however in his later career as a consultant that he created the Gantt chart for which he is most known today. There is however an almost catastrophic misunderstanding around his most famous invention. Gantt never used the charts for any kind of project work. The initial problem he was seeking to solve was to find a way of showing visually the flow of materials through a manufacturing facility. For this purpose the chart was ideal. All it had to show was an overall deterministic process based on a series of known durations for the individual discrete processes required. In such situations inconsistencies and differences such as batch sizes and lead-times are known overall but create float and variation. With the Gantt chart you could see what was possible and impossible and therefore target where improvement, if any, should be made. When, some time after this use case was established, people asked Gantt whether his charts would have any utility for managing projects he suggested not. His reasoning at the time was “As soon as the plan is made, it will likely become very quickly out-of-date” and the historical record shows that Gantt never used his charts for such a purpose. Even when he had a seemingly strong case to do so - he was tasked with managing performance in building the US liberty ships - he suggested that “a better measure of performance and progress would be something simple like the number of rivets driven”. Having been intrigued by the disdain for Gantt chart based project plans in my early experiences within technical projects, I soon found that most technical staff treated any form of project management like ‘homeopathy’ and of questionable added value. Project managers whose careers started in production tended to believe the project staff were being deliberately evasive and obtuse but over time, when I got into the work, being obsessed with how people work collectively I began to see the real flaws and understood why people thought the way they did.

I can summarise these insights as follows:

1) What makes projects distinct from regular, repetitive, recurring and routine work is that projects at their outset always contain (currently) unknown work that requires time for discovery and exploration before the full extent of the project is understood. Very often the required time and work required to achieve this is compromised by both, organisation structures and time based pressures, to get more tangible things done to give a concrete impression of progress.

2) I soon learned that most project Gantt charts unwittingly encourage the wrong things being done at the wrong times and don’t facilitate what really adds value. This is especially true in two key areas of the work.

3) I witnessed first hand that the switch from face-to-face negotiated team working to the phenomenon I called ‘technical tennis’ enabled by e:mail, was seemingly invisible to the Gantt chart. In short, people who would have previously reached a compromise quickly via real-time, real-world dialogue could now engage in ‘technical tennis’ matches facilitated by a new low bandwidth form of communication. I soon saw project timelines stretch out and nothing within the project management orthodoxy or the Gantt chart and individual task lists could stop it.

4) Thinking it was a behavioural issue I pioneered the use of multi-disciplinary team-working in a single open spaces which had some benefits but also lead to a lot of unnecessary costs due to ‘technical tourism’. I realised we had to create and plan the required flow in new way distinct from the Gantt chart and the then project management orthodoxy.

We started by seeking to understand what the actual work was and concluded the following:

There are 5 distinct project work type elements:

a) Flow of Discoveries

b) Flow of Decisions

c) Flow of Definitions so that

d) The flow of physical Doing tasks could take place

e) Throughout the above a flow of Documentation

We also learned that unlike the Gantt chart temptation, any chance to sequence any of the above concurrently must be resisted until:

We identify the multi-disciplinary-team required for the most efficient flow of each distinct work element. Each work element must be designed to be executed by an optimal team specific to the task. Only when you see the demands this flow of work places upon the people as the critical resource can you begin to see if things can be done in parallel without introducing lots of wasteful activities downstream. With regard to timelines we were able to use 5D to see at-a-glance where breakthroughs were needed in order to secure the time based performance of any project. To date every project planned and executed by 5D has delivered on-time, cost, quality and morale.

We have also used the 5D template for senior leaders to manage work upgrade transformation itself to great effect reducing the need for complex X-matrix style policy deployment.

If you would like to learn more about creating dramatic improvement within project work please contact us for a free senior leadership overview of the method and your role within project performance transformation.