Gantt chart

A Gantt chart is a bar chart that provides a visual view of

project tasks scheduled over time. A Gantt chart is used for
project planning: it’s a useful way of showing what work is
scheduled to be done on specific days. It helps project managers
and team members view the start dates, end dates and milestones
of a project schedule in one simple stacked bar chart.

On a Gantt chart you can easily see:

 The start date of the project schedule

  What the project tasks are

 Which team member is working on each task

 When tasks start and finish

 How long each task will take

 How tasks group together, overlap and link with each other

 Task dependencies, milestones and the critical path of your

project

 The finish date of the project

The vertical axis of a Gantt chart shows the tasks that need to be
completed, while the horizontal axis represents the project timeline.
As you input tasks, their start dates, their end dates and their
dependencies, bars on the stacked bar chart will populate, which
represent task durations. This happens automatically if you use
a project management tool equipped with a Gantt chart maker.

Most Gantt diagrams are created in Excel or with project

management software, which is sometimes referred to as Gantt
chart software. If you choose to make Gantt charts with Gantt chart
software, instead of using an Excel Gantt chart template, then you’ll
be able to do more than see task durations and due dates.

With Gantt chart software, you can create a work breakdown

structure, assign tasks to team members, track project progress in
real time and drag and drop timelines to instantly update
your project schedule.

What Is a Gantt Chart Used for in Project

Management?
The uses of a Gantt chart, as you can see by the sheer number of
teams and roles who can benefit from using Gantt charts, are many.
Here are just a few:

 Plan & Schedule Projects

 Plan & Schedule Tasks

 Plan & Schedule Tasks across multiple projects

 View Tasks Over Time

 Plan in Sprints

 Team Collaboration

 Resource Management

 Scheduling Teams’ Work

 Determining Planned versus Actual Timelines on a Project

The advantages of the Gantt chart are

• time is explicit (and linear)

• all tasks visible in relationship to others

• deadlines are shown

• project status at intermediate times is shown

• can show progress by “filling in” task boxes The unmodified Gantt chart has the following
shortcomings:

• tasks might not be associated with people

PERT
A few of the shortcomings of the Gantt chart are solved in the PERT chart (Program Evaluation and
Review Technique”).The PERT chart uses a connected series of nodes to make explicit dependencies
between tasks. In addition, the order of tasks is given by the flow of the connections left to right, but the
horizontal axis is not necessarily linear in time.

The PERT chart can be more compact than the Gantt, but does so at the cost of a linear time scale. The
time resources required by a task are given numerically, rather than appearing graphically (i.e.,
horizontal dimension) as in the Gantt chart; this may make it harder to quickly see what areas are using
the most time resources. CPM The CPM (Critical Path Management) chart is similar to the PERT chart .