CALENDAR REFORM: GANTT CHART - ADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS



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CALENDAR
To each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though, not necessarily, synchronized with the cycles of some astronomical phenomenon, such as the cycle of the sun, or the moon. Many civilizations and societies have devised a calendar, usually derived from other calendars on which they model their system, suited to their particular needs.
A calendar is also a physical device (often paper). This is the most common usage of the word. Other similar types of calendars can include computerized systems, which can be set to remind the user of upcoming events and appointments.

CALENDAR SYSTEMS
A full calendar system has a different calendar date for every day. Thus the week cycle is by itself not a full calendar system; neither is a system to name the days within a year without a system for identifying the years.

TYPES OF CALENDAR
1.         Week and weekday – this system (without year, the week number keeps on increasing) is not very common
2.         Year and ordinal date within the year, e.g. the ISO 8610 ordinal date system calendars with two levels of cycles:
3.         Gregorian Calendar
4.         Julian Calendar
5.         Islamic Calendar
6.         Hebrew Calendar
7.         Lunar Calendar
8.         Persian Calendar
9.         Egyptian Calendars 
10.       Solar Calendars
11.       Calendar Reform
           
MAIN ARTICLE: CALENDAR REFORM
There have been a number of proposals for reform of the calendar, such as the World Calendar, International Fixed Calendar and Holocene calendar. The United Nations considered adopting such a reformed calendar for a while in the 1950s, but these proposals have lost most of their popularity.

GANTT CHART
A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Some Gantt charts also show the dependency (i.e, precedence network) relationships between activities. Gantt charts can be used to show current schedule status using percent-complete shadings and a vertical.

DEVELOPMENT
The first known Gantt Chart was developed in 1896 by Karol Adamiecki, who called it a harmonogram. Because Adamiecki did not publish his chart until 1931- and in any case his works were published in either Polish or Russian, languages not popular in the West- the chart now bears the name of Henry Gantt (1861-1919), who designed his chart around the years 1910-1915 and popularized it in the West.
In the 1980s, personal computers eased the creation and editing of elaborate Gantt charts. These desktop applications were intended mainly for project managers and project schedulers. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Gantt charts became a common feature of we-based applications, including collaborative groupware.
Although now regarded as a common charting technique, Gantt charts were considered revolutionary when they were introduced to recognition of Henry Gantt’s contributions, the Henry Laurence Gantt medal is awarded for distinguished achievement in management and in community service. This chart is used also in Information Technology to represent data that has been collected.

ADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS
Gantt charts have become a common technique for representing the phases  and activities of a project work breakdown structure (WBS), so they can be understood by a wide audience. A common error made by those who equate Gantt chart design with project design is that they attempt to define the project work breakdown structure at the same time that they define schedule activities. This practice makes it very difficult to follow the 100% Rule. Instead the WBS should be fully defined to follow the 100% Rule, then the project schedule can be designed.
Although a Gantt chart is easily comprehended for small projects that fit on a single sheet or screen, they can become quite unwieldy for projects with more than about 30 activities. Larger Gantt charts may not be suitable for most computer displays. A related criticism is that Gantt charts communicate relatively little information per unit area of display. That is, projects are often considerably more complex than can be communicated effectively with a Gantt chart. Gantt charts only represent part of the triple constraints of projects, because they focus primarily on scheduled management. Moreover, Gantt charts do not represent the size of a project or the relative size of work elements, therefore the magnitude of a behind-schedule condition is easily mis-communicated. If two projects are the same number of days behind schedule, the larger project has a larger impact on resource utilizations, yet the Gantt does not represent this difference. 
Although project management software can schedule dependencies as lines between activities, displaying a large number of dependencies may result in a cluttered or unreadable chart.
Because the horizontal bars of a Gantt chart have a fixed height, they can misrepresent the time-phased workload (resource requirements) of a project. In the example shown in this article, Activities E and G appear to be the same size, but in reality they may be orders of magnitude different. A related criticism is that all activities of a Gantt chart show planned workload as constant. In practice, many activities (especially summary elements) have front-loaded or back-loaded work plans.
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