GANTT CHART

Henry L Gantt has done pioneering work in the field of project Management. The
chart devising method of early 20th century is still being used, albeit with
modifications, to monitor the progress of the project. A Gantt Chart, commonly used
in project Management, is one of the most popular and useful ways of showing
activities (tasks or events) displayed against time. There is a list of the activities on
the left side of the chart and a suitable time scale along the top. Each activity is
represented by a bar; the position and length of the bar reflecting the start date,
duration and end date of the activity. The chart allows us to examine the following
at a glance:
 What are the various activities?
 When does each activity begin and end?
 How long each activity is scheduled to last?
 Do the activities overlap with other activities and to what extent?
 What are the start and end dates of the project?
Although the first Gantt chart was devised in the mid-1890s by Karol Adamiecki, a
Polish engineer, who ran a steelworks factory in southern Poland and had become
interested in Management ideas and techniques, the credit for developing this
technique lies with Henry Gantt. Some 15 years after Adamiecki, Henry Gantt, an
American engineer and management consultant, devised his own version of the
chart. The chart became popular in western countries. Consequently, it was Henry
Gantt whose name was to become associated with charts of this type. Originally,
Gantt charts were prepared laboriously by hand; each time a project changed, it was
necessary to amend to redraw the chart and this limited their usefulness, with
continual change being a feature of most projects. Now-a-days, however, with the
advent of computers and Project Management Software, Gantt charts can be created,
updated and printed easily.
STEPS INVOLVED IN SOLVING RESOURCES SMOOTHING PROBLEMS
1. The first step is construct the network diagram using the activity on arrow
(AOA) convention.
2. The second step is to identify the critical path and duration of the project.
3. The third step is to construct a time-scaled version of the project. The
resources required on activities at every specific point in time are then
summed up. This process is repeated for every time unit from the start node
to the finish node. At the end of this step, we have the resource requirement
for every time unit.
 4. These resource requirements are plotted against the time duration for project
completion and this plot is called a load histogram. This load histogram
identifies the time slots when there is a peak demand for resources and the
time slots when there is no demand for resources. These days of extreme
requirement must be either pushed forward or backward by utilizing the
floats on some of the activity chains.
5. The critical path is next drawn as a straight line from the start node to the end
node. The other paths originating from different nodes and ending at other
nodes are drawn either above or below the critical path. On the non-critical
paths, the activity floats are shown as dotted lines.
6. The activity floats are moved along the length of the non-critical paths to
reduce (or increase) the requirements of resources on those particular time
slots.
It should be noted that this process adopts the trial and error method and that there
is no unique method of working out solutions. Therefore, there is no one best
solution in this case and any solution that makes the resource requirements uniform
is acceptable.