As you pass by your manager’s office, you may notice several graphs posted on his or her wall. Go to another department, pass by another manager’s office, and you will most likely see the same thing on the wall. You will find that most managers employ this particular charting technique. That chart is known as the Gantt chart, and if you are aspiring to become a manager yourself, chances are you will have to make one of these for your own project.
So what exactly is a Gantt chart? Why do managers use it all the time? The Gantt chart is a tool used in project management that allows project managers to:
- See a clear picture of the flow and the schedules of all the tasks involved in a project.
- Arrange tasks according to dependencies.
- Easily spot any possible choke points in a project, and apply necessary action before problems happen.
- Ensure that resources allotted to a certain task will not be used up by another task.
- Monitor the progress of the project, and see which tasks are behind schedule.
- Divide the whole project into short-term goals, and designate milestones for these goals.
- Visually present the current status or progress of the project to all kinds of people – managers or non-managers alike. Even someone who is not part of the project can easily understand the Gantt chart!
Indeed, the Gantt chart is very useful for almost every element of the project manager’s scope of work. Using Gantt chart software will certainly speed up things, but it is also important to know the parts of a Gantt chart.
A timeline at the top part of the Gantt chart more or less corresponds to the estimated duration of the whole project. The whole timeline, for example, can take up 6 months, and divided in weeks, suggesting that an updated Gantt chart is presented on a weekly basis. To the left of the Gantt chart is the list or inventory of tasks involved in a project. Each task will occupy its own row. To the right of every task, below the timeline, is a bar or a line which represents the actual schedule of the task.
You will notice that each bar starts and ends at certain points in the timeline, and this corresponds to the actual start date and the project end date of each task. With this, you will clearly see the time it takes for each of the tasks to complete, giving you a quick glimpse of what happened, what’s happening, and what will happen in your project. Optionally, these lines or bars may be color-coded to signify progress, or resource allotment, or personnel designations.
With the development of computer technology, several Gantt chart software programs came about. Most Gantt chart software has all the basic parts and functions of a standard Gantt chart, with some offering more. Gantt chart software such as Microsoft Project has integrated Gantt charts with its user interface, making it easy to create or make changes to Gantt charts. Several other Gantt chart software such as FusionCharts allow for online interactive Gantt chart presentations using the Flash animated format.