From the course: Project Management Simplified

Add time and money to your Gantt

From the course: Project Management Simplified

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Add time and money to your Gantt

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- [Instructor] So here we are. I've already set up the critical path, and the floating tasks, and the names, and the dates. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to change these ones into more useful numbers, so I can put real hours. So let's suppose it's going to take Dianne six hours a week to choose the country. She's going to spend a day a week Googling and researching. And let's suppose that Cody is going to have to have a four hour meeting with the permit issuing office. And then he's going to have to wait. Now, I don't like the way it doesn't color in if there's a zero, so I've got a little trick, I like to put an O instead. (laughs) So I'm going to put that. And then Cody has a little busy patch just at the end there, where he has another meeting, let's say another four hour meeting. So, you would then go through, and you would put the hours on all of the bars. So, I've got all my numbers now, along the bars, for the hours it's going to take to do each job. And I can then add these up vertically to get my total hours. If I just go to AutoSum, that tells me I've got six hours of work in week number one. And then by copying that across, I can see how much time I need to put in in total to my project. So if I'm doing all the work myself, I can add up my total hours. And I can see I've got some pretty busy weeks here. Some pretty busy weeks over here. And if I've got a team, I can look at the total number of hours for my team. If you're doing a really huge project, these numbers could actually be the numbers of people involved. You know, this is requiring 15 people on a particular job, and 27 people in total. So, you can use these numbers however you like. Now, AutoSum also works horizontally. So what I can do is, if I go horizontally like this, right to the end here and click on AutoSum, I can see that I've got a total of 380 hours required for my project. And if I drag this upwards, I can look at the total required for each task. I like to get rid of the zeros, just for neatness. So I can now see how many hours I'm spending on each task, and also when I'm using my hours. So I can see I've got a busy patch here in March, and I've got a busy patch here in July. And I can also look, and I can see that this task here, modifying the building, is my busiest task. And then my second busiest task is hiring the staff. And I can think, "Do I want to spend 52 hours hiring the staff?" Maybe it would work out cheaper to have a recruitment agency or something like that. So I can sanity check, "Do these numbers look right?" And I can also think, "Do I want to spend that much time on those tasks?" So, the final thing I want to show you is I'm going to rename this sheet hours. And then I'm going to make a copy of the whole sheet. So I'm going to right click, and I'm going to go Move or Copy. Move to the end, Create a copy. And I'm going to call this second copy costs. I've got two identical sheets here, but I can go back through and I can put the money into these bars instead of the time. So, in the same way that I had for the hours, I can now see my costs. I can see what I'm spending when. I can I've got some big expenditure there, week commencing 8th of March. And I've got another bit there, 2nd of May. And I've got quite a lot of money being spent around July. I can see that my total expenditure is $1,298. And I can also see what I'm spending the money on. I can see that my most expensive things are these two here, the buying of the site, and the modifying of the building. And I could just sanity check and think, "Does that feel right?" So, I've now got all the detail I need about the money I'm going to spend, and the hours that I'm going to spend on my project. So, my Gannt chart is complete. And remember that if I have more than 20 tasks, say I have 200, I can have a high-level Gannt chart like this, and then within my 20 high level tasks I can have sub-plans, which come from a smaller Post-it Note plan. And they now become sub-Gannts. So, taking an example something like, "Get the permit." On a separate sheet I could have a little sub-Gannt, which explains what's going on within that task. And then I can keep my high-level Gannt nice and simple, and then I can drill into the details of getting the permit when I get to that task, if I want to. So there you are. That is a Gannt chart in Excel.

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