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Gantt Chart and PERT
The Gantt chart and program evaluation and review technique (PERT) are project management frameworks that are used to schedule, organize, and coordinate activities in a project. Project management has grown in importance due to increased complexity in the development process of goods and services. Membership in Project Management Institute (PMI) has grown from 7,500 members in 1990 to more than 334,000 members in 2010, according to PMI 2010 annual report. The Gantt chart and PERT have become indispensable parts of the contemporary manager’s toolbox. The Gantt chart was developed by Henry Gantt, a pioneer in the field of scientific management, as a graphical aid to scheduling jobs on machines in the late 1910s. PERT is a network diagram analysis technique developed in the late 1950s by Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., under contract to the U.S. Navy for the Polaris Missile Project. PERT is similar to critical path method (CPM), developed around the same time by DuPont and Remington Rand. PERT and CPM both employ the critical path analysis to determine the project completion time and start and finish times of each activity. The difference between PERT and CPM is that PERT gives probabilistic estimates when activity times are uncertain and CPM offers the option of reducing activity times by adding more resources. Today’s project management software incorporates features of both approaches, so the distinction between the two techniques is no longer necessary. In the next section, the fundamentals of PERT and the Gantt chart are explained. It is followed by comparison and evaluation of the two methods and suggested readings for further information.
Fundamentals
PERT Network Diagram
PERT network diagram graphically illustrates the following: (a) when the project can be finished, (b) when each activity should be scheduled, (c) which activities are critical (i.e., a bottleneck) that must be started as soon as possible to avoid delaying the project completion, and (d) how long each noncritical activity can be delayed before the project completion time is delayed.
There are two types of PERT network diagrams: activity-on-arrow (AOA) and activity-on-node (AON). In an AOA diagram, the arrow represents the activity, and the node represents events such as the completion of one or more activities. In an AON diagram, the node represents the activity, and the arrow represents the sequencing between activities. Over time, AOA diagrams have lost ground to AON diagrams, which are more easily created with software. An AON network diagram shown in Figure 1 consists of nodes representing activities and arrows connecting the nodes to indicate precedence relationships. Specifically, an arrow from Activity I to Activity J indicates that Activity I is an immediate predecessor of Activity J. This means Activity J can be started only after Activity I is completed. Conversely, Activity J is called an immediate successor of Activity I. Each node contains the following information:
- Activity (task) name
- Activity duration: the length of time an activity will take (in weeks)
- Early start (ES): the earliest time when an activity can start
- Early finish (EF): the earliest time when an activity can finish
- Late start (LS): the latest time when an activity can start without delaying project completion
- Late finish (LF): the latest time when an activity can finish without delaying project completion
- Slack: the length of time an activity can be delayed without delaying project completion, computed as LS–ES or LF–EF.
Figure 1 PERT Network Diagram
Source: Author.
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