Whether you’re working on a big collaborative project or a little personal one, it is helpful to keep track of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done in order to meet your goals. A Gantt chart is a tool designed to help with project management fundamentals like breaking a big project into doable pieces, setting project timelines, and tracking actual progress over time.
I first learned about Gantt charts from a course on Lynda.com. In its simplest form, a Gantt chart is like a spreadsheet: the rows represent pieces of a project like tasks or budget items, and the columns represent units of time.
There are plenty of project management programs that can help you make a Gantt chart, but a spreadsheet application (like Excel) will also work just fine. Start by listing all of a project’s “pieces” that you want to track, giving each one its own row in your spreadsheet. Usually these will represent tasks or steps in a process. Then figure out how much time you think each piece should take, and if the tasks have to happen in a certain sequence, rearrange them in that order.
To reach my goal of serving lasagne at 6:00 pm, I will need to complete this series of tasks.
Once you know all the pieces of your project and the order in which they need to get done, decide how to spread them over the time you have. Choose a unit of time that makes sense for your project (days, weeks, or months), and give each time-unit its own column.
I want to serve lasagne at 6:00, and I can start around 2:00, so I divided my time into half-hour intervals.
Now for the fun part! For each task, fill in cells that correspond to the units of time that task will take. If two tasks need to happen in a particular sequence (and can’t be happening at the same time), make sure that the second task’s filled cells begin in the column after the first task ends. As you fill in cells to represent the time that each task should take, it will be easy to see patterns: some times will be very busy with several tasks happening at once, and any sequences of tasks will have a stair-stepped appearance.
I filled cells in each row to represent when each task should be done.
Once your project is underway, your Gantt chart is useful for tracking progress. Because each column represents one unit of time, you can scan the chart vertically to see what is supposed to be happening at that moment. You can also experiment with how you fill cells; for instance, you might simply outline groups of cells to represent the time a given task will take, then fill the cells with color to represent progress.
If it’s 3:30, I’d better be preparing the sauce, noodles, and ricotta filling!
Some key terms associated with Gantt charts are dependencies and critical path. Dependencies are strict relationships between tasks; for instance, “Task B cannot begin until Task A is complete.” If the tasks in your project must happen in a particular sequence, then your project has a bunch of dependencies. A project’s critical path is the whole sequence of things that must happen in order for the project to succeed. For example, if your project were to make lasagne, the critical path would probably include items like buying the ingredients, assembling the lasagne, and putting the lasagne in the oven. Items not on the critical path are those that could take extra time or go unfinished without preventing project success. In the case of the lasagne, a task not on the critical path might be to boil the lasagne noodles or add parsley to the ricotta; if you skip these tasks, your lasagne might turn out a little differently than expected, but you could still meet your goal of making lasagne.
I use Gantt charts to help manage the faculty research projects in the Mellon initiative. Each project has its own chart containing all the main tasks to be done and the time they are expected to take. I find it really useful to be able to check a project’s Gantt chart and evaluate at a glance whether we have made the progress we should have by this point in time. Every member of the team has access to the chart so that they can easily check to see if their own tasks and the tasks they depend on are all on track.
Do you use Gantt charts or something similar to manage projects? Feel free to tell me about it in the comments.
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For more information: https://pmoglobalinstitute.org/project-management-office/