From the course: Project Management Simplified
How to create a Gantt chart
From the course: Project Management Simplified
How to create a Gantt chart
- Now we come to Step Six which is to create your Gantt chart. It's basically just a bar chart showing all the tasks in your plan drawn along a timeline. Gantt charts are great because everything's drawn out to scale. Even people who know nothing about project management can immediately understand what they're looking at, with the tasks down the side and the dates across the top. Creating your Gantt chart, and by the way it's called that because it was invented by Henry Gantt about a hundred years ago. Creating it is easy if you have the post-it notes to work from. If you don't bother with the post-its and you drop straight to the Gantt, then it will be really hard, almost impossible. It'll take you ages and you'll very likely get some of it wrong. So always do the post-its before you make your Gantt chart. I'm going to show you how you can easily convert the post-it plan across into the Gantt chart using Excel. I like Excel because everyone's got it and we all know how to use it already. But you could also use Microsoft Project or one of many other project management software packages. And the principles that I'm going to show you are the same whatever software you use. So here's how we do it. First, put a list of the tasks down the left-hand side with the critical path listed first and then the floating tasks below that. And then put the weeks across the top. And you know how many weeks are needed from having worked out the length of the critical path when you did your post-its. Next, you can put in the critical path, which is drawn coming down in steps, like this. And I'm using my previous example with the times added with contingency and then crashed. You can see how the Gantt Chart easily shows the decision I've made to overlap the permit and the purchase of the site in order to save a couple of weeks. Next, we put in the floating tasks one at a time as shown here. You can see that for each task I've put vertical lines showing the limits of its allowable movement or float. What must it come after and what must it be done before? For example, finding the site must wait until after we've chosen the country. And it must be done before we purchase the site. So that's the range it goes into and I can then decide whether to do it earlier or later within that range. There are two slight variations, both of which I've shown in my example for you. One is the sharing of float. The manager and the buying of furniture both fit between choosing the country and installing the furniture so they share that space. The other is floaters that depend on other floaters. So the staff are hanging off the manager, who is a movable, or floating, task. It's not as difficult as it sounds. You just add them in with the verticals coming off the previous tasks. Once you understand these two variations, you can now make any Gantt chart. You could make the biggest Gantt chart in the world. Just use these building blocks to keep adding tasks until you've got them all. Since everything hangs off the critical path, you could see that you must have the post-it note plan before we can produce the Gantt chart because that's what tells us which tasks are on the critical path. Always do your post-its first, and then the Gantt chart is easy. How long did this one take me, do you think? 10 minutes, maybe 20? It's easy and great use of time because now my plan is very clearly visible to everyone.
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