Gantt Chart Quotes

Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends — passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us — rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts — bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We’re perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we’re trained to lean towards something we don’t have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are.

Though time management seems a problem as old as time itself, the science of scheduling began in the machine shops of the industrial revolution. In 1874, Frederick Taylor, the son of a wealthy lawyer, turned down his acceptance at Harvard to become an apprentice machinist at Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia. Four years later, he completed his apprenticeship and began working at the Midvale Steel Works, where he rose through the ranks from lathe operator to machine shop foreman and ultimately to chief engineer. In the process, he came to believe that the time of the machines (and people) he oversaw was not being used very well, leading him to develop a discipline he called “Scientific Management.” Taylor created a planning office, at the heart of which was a bulletin board displaying the shop’s schedule for all to see. The board depicted every machine in the shop, showing the task currently being carried out by that machine and all the tasks waiting for it. This practice would be built upon by Taylor’s colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century’s most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System. A century later, Gantt charts still adorn the walls and screens of project managers at firms like Amazon, IKEA, and SpaceX.

Completed project plans. Requirements will vary by company but often include Gantt charts; stakeholder analysis; resistance analysis; risk analysis; action logs, responsibility assignments, and communication plans (not covered in this book)

The How of Achieving Goals Each year, organizations spend thousands of hours defining WHAT needs to be achieved in the near future—objectives are set, plans are made, Gantt charts are drafted, and to-do lists are created—all of which are tactical in nature. However, organizations nearly always overlook the HOW of achieving their goals: HOW we will behave when working together HOW we will talk about each other, even when the other person is not present HOW we will resolve disagreements and respond when things do not go to plan HOW we will leverage our individual experiences and skills to work together to achieve the corporate goals The HOW focuses on identifying who is involved in achieving each goal. Regularly reviewing this means we can identify new skills or capabilities that may be required and then determine how the organization will provide these, whether it will be an in-house (build) or a recruit-and-hire externally (buy) approach. In focusing on the HOW, an organization can identify new roles or additional headcount needed to support a growth strategy. It can look for opportunities to streamline and create efficiencies.

Scrum, for example, was never meant to stand in place of design. No matter how many project and product managers would like to keep you marching on a relentless path of continuous delivery, Scrum was not meant only as a means to keep Gantt chart enthusiasts happy. Yet, it has become that in so many cases.

Basecamp refused to add Gantt Charts to their product. For that they were labelled blind ideologists

Basecamp refused to add Gantt Charts to their product. For that they were labelled blind ideologists.

Ricky asks her, “You lost your earrings in the living room?” She shakes her head. “No, I lost them in the bedroom. But the light out here is much better.” And there it is. Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health. Studying spreadsheets and Gantt charts and financial statements is relatively safe and predictable, which most executives prefer. That’s how they’ve been trained, and that’s where they’re comfortable. What they usually want to avoid at all costs are subjective conversations that can easily become emotional and awkward. And organizational health is certainly fraught with the potential for subjective and awkward conversations.

No Rick, your Gantt chart is not working, and it never has!

There are bubbles of agile in a sea of Gantt charts with predetermined solutions, dates, and spending predicted at the point of knowing the least, an annual, bottom-up financial planning process that takes six months of the year to plan and re-plan and focuses on output over outcomes. There are “drop dead dates” and “deadlines” (in most cases it’s not life or death); RAG (red, amber, green) statuses and change control processes; a change lifecycle with twenty mandatory artifacts, most with their own stage-gate governance committee; a traditional waterfall Project Management Office; sixty-page Steering Committee decks; project plans with the word “sprint” ten times in the middle; a lack of psychological safety; a performance appraisal model that incentivizes mediocrity (underpromise to overdeliver) and uses a Think Big, Start Big, Learn Slow approach. The good news, with a charitable intent, is that the organization wants to improve.

Taylor created a planning office, at the heart of which was a bulletin board displaying the shop's schedule for all to see. The board depicted every machine in the shop. showing the task currently being carried out by that machine and all the task waiting for it. This practice would be built upon by Taylor's colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century's most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System.

The practices and artifacts of Scrum –backlogs, sprints, stand ups, increments, burn charts –reflect an understanding of the need to strike a balance between planning and improvisation, and the value of engaging the entire team in both. As we’ll see later, Agile and Lean ideas can be useful beyond their original ecosystems, but translation must be done mindfully. The history of planning from Taylor to Agile reflects a shift in the zeitgeist –the spirit of the age –from manufacturing to software that affects all aspects of work and life. In business strategy, attention has shifted from formal strategic planning to more collaborative, agile methods. In part, this is due to the clear weakness of static plans as noted by Henry Mintzberg. Plans by their very nature are designed to promote inflexibility. They are meant to establish clear direction, to impose stability on an organization… planning is built around the categories that already exist in the organization.[ 43] But the resistance to plans is also fueled by fashion. In many organizations, the aversion to anything old is palpable. Project managers have burned their Gantt charts. Everything happens emergently in Trello and Slack. And this is not all good. As the pendulum swings out of control, chaos inevitably strikes. In organizations of all shapes and sizes, the failure to fit process to context hurts people and bottom lines. It’s time to realize we can’t not plan, and there is no one best way. Defining and embracing a process is planning, and it’s vital to find your fit. That’s why I believe in planning by design. As a professional practice, design exists across contexts. People design all sorts of objects, systems, services, and experiences. While each type of design has unique tools and methods, the creative process is inspired by commonalities. Designers make ideas tangible so we can see what we think. And as Steve Jobs noted, “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like.

This practice would be built upon by Taylor’s colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century’s most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System. A century later, Gantt charts still adorn the walls and screens of project managers at firms like Amazon, IKEA, and SpaceX.

It seems to me that Scrum and other agile techniques are being used as substitutes for careful modeling, where a product backlog is thrust at developers as if it serves as a set of designs. Most agile practitioners will leave their daily stand-up without giving a second thought to how their backlog tasks will affect the underlying model of the business. Although I assume this is needless to say, I must assert that Scrum, for example, was never meant to stand in place of design. No matter how many project and product managers would like to keep you marching on a relentless path of continuous delivery, Scrum was not meant only as a means to keep Gantt chart enthusiasts happy. Yet, it has become that in so many cases.

It seems to me that Scrum and other agile techniques are being used as substitutes for careful modeling, where a product backlog is thrust at developers as if it serves as a set of designs. Most agile practitioners will leave their daily stand-up without giving a second thought to how their backlog tasks will affect the underlying model of the business. Although I assume this is needless to say, I must assert that Scrum, for example, was never meant to stand in place of design. No matter how many project and product managers would like to keep you marching on a relentless path of continuous delivery, Scrum was not meant only as a means to keep Gantt chart enthusiasts happy. Yet, it has become that in so many cases.

In too many places, employees are segregated by what they do, so product managers might sit here but the engineers are kept in that building across the street. This can work for traditional product managers, who are usually good with PERT and Gantt charts31

Besides simply organizing a project and ensuring timeliness, Gantt’s intent, like Taylor’s, was to figure out scientific, systematic ways of getting more work out of each individual worker. The problem with how bar charts are used today is twofold: (1) it now reinforces the separation of planning from doing, because the people creating the charts are too far removed from the actual work on-site, and (2) it does not depict the time work is waiting to be processed (what, in the world of operations science, is termed queue time—later in the book you will learn why this is so important).

This LNG project is a manifestation of all the Era 1 mistakes: orchestrated by several of the biggest companies in the world, with ample resources made available to ensure its completion—and it still doesn’t go right. The hundreds of planners and schedulers are out of touch with guys on the ground. They have consultants out there doing time studies; they’re using a Gantt chart to do the planning; it’s highly craft based; they’ve got psychologists on-site preoccupied with behavior and mental health, which is not a problem in and of itself but misses the forest for the trees by assuming the problem is the humans rather than the process.