See which activities are on the critical path.Determine current progress and remaining activities.Quickly see dependencies, milestones, and activity durations.Understand the most important schedule information in a glance.Gantt charts provide the following benefits to project managers and others who need to understand ongoing projects. Expanded and detailed charts with every WBS element can be helpful for program managers, master schedulers, risk managers, and the like. They are also useful for those familiar with the project. Gantt charts are particularly useful for presenting to busy executives who need an update on the progress and the remaining work on a project. You should use a Gantt chart when you need to explain the schedule quickly to those familiar or unfamiliar with the project. For example, a gantt chart from the software program wrike looks like this:Īs you can see, many of the elements are very similar. There are also other formats for Gantt Charts. The arrows show dependencies between activities.The black solid lines show available slack.The blue bars display noncritical path items.Each bar represents an activity within the project.Here’s a quick key to what the elements in figure one convey: You may be wondering what these bars and lines mean.

Software programs create these automatically based on activity input.įigure 1: An example Gantt Chart Made Using Microsoft Project Management Software. Gantt charts sum up the project activities, critical path, schedule, schedule dependencies, slack, deadlines, and progress in an easy to understand graphic. If you’ve watched someone present a project before, you may have already seen a Gantt chart. We’ll discuss below how you can create one using project management software like Wrike and MS Project. Thankfully this is no longer the case as software programs can do almost all of the work for you. In the past, Gantt charts were created by hand. So the gantt chart is a hundred flippin’ years. Gantt created his version in the 1910’s – 1910-1915 to be exact. The Gantt that you think of when you think of Gantt charts is actually named after it’s creator, Henry Gantt. The first “gantt” chart was created by a guy named Karol Adamiecki in 1896 who referred to it as a “harmonogram”, but he received little credit since his work was done in the Polish language. Gantt Chart: A chart that displays the schedule of a project combined with activity length, critical paths, dependences, deadlines, and more.

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