From the course: Project Management Simplified

A reason to love Gantt charts

From the course: Project Management Simplified

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A reason to love Gantt charts

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- I love Gantt charts. And there are four reasons why I love them, and why I think they're completely essential to every project of whatever type and size. First is communication. They're by far the best way to show other people what the project consists of so everyone can see who's doing what and when, and how their part contributes to the whole project. And they can all commit and promise that they will keep the time free so that they can do their bit when the time comes. It's so much more visual than just a list of tasks with dates on. You can see what's big and what is small, what's critical and what is floating, and how much float things have. The second reason I love Gantt charts is resource planning. The Gantt allows you to instantly see when the busy periods are. You can look vertically and see how busy you are in any one week. There's no other way to predict ahead of time how busy you're going to be, and this is really useful information to know so you can prepare for busy periods in advance. The third reason that Gantt charts are great is to monitor your progress against the plan by coloring in the tasks that you've done. Coloring in what you've done is quick and easy, and it gives a brilliant view of how the project's getting on. I've never seen a better way of doing this. For example, crossing tasks off a list tells you what you've done, but it doesn't easily allow you to compare what you've actually done with what you should've done by now. The Gantt chart is simple and visible and brilliant. And finally, my fourth reason is that the Gantt chart allows you to make sense of the financial information that you receive. If you've spent half of your budget, you need to know from the colored-in Gantt chart whether you've done half the work or not. Maybe you've only done a quarter, but you've been overspending on that quarter, so the accountants think the total looks okay when it isn't. Again, the Gantt chart allows you to look at the planned costs of what you've actually done, and it's really the only way to do this. Without it, you don't really know what's going on financially, which is pretty important. So, communication, resources, progress, and costs, four reasons why you must have a Gantt chart.

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