A Practical Guide to Gantt Charts

A Gantt chart is a type of horizontal bar chart commonly used in project management, which is a visual view of tasks scheduled overtime. It provides a graphical visualization of a schedule that helps to plan, coordinate, and track specific tasks (or elements) in a project.

A Gantt chart shows the start and finishes dates of several elements of a project which could be tasks, but also other types of elements, i.e. resources, milestones, tasks, and dependencies. Each bar represents an element of a project, with the length of the bar for describing the amount of time that elements will take, that gives teams an overview of what task needs to get done, who’s responsible for it, and when they should be completed. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationships between activities and current schedule status. There a quite a number of advantages for using Gannt in project management which includes:

• Show what needs to be done and the order of them in a holistic view
• Clearer overview of keep track scheduled tasks
• Can decompose a project into a different cluster of smaller tasks of project milestones
• Shows what planned to be completed with each phase

Create a Task Plan for Your IT Project

• Start with the list of deliverables and tasks
• Break tasks into sub-tasks (if your project consists of several phases)
• Estimate time needed to complete each task
• Identify dependencies among sub-tasks
• Distribute across a real time-scale

The following table shows the tasks, dependencies, and estimated times a project manager might input to a basic GANTT chart for a software development project.

• Task 1 has no predecessors, and can thus start on 18 November.
• The Gantt chart shows the task as a box starting on 18 November and finishing on 23 November on the horizontal access.
• Task 7 requires Task 6 to be completed, and the duration is three days, so the box covers the dates 20 to 23 June. The line from the finish of Task 6 to the start of Task 7 indicates the dependency.

Note that Tasks 11 and 13 all require Task 10 to be completed, and have no other dependencies, so these all start on the same date.

Visualize Your Schedule in Gantt Chart

The chart below show all seven days of the week, but often, weekend days are excluded. Now that your tasks are all in place in the table above, along with their corresponding dates and duration, it’s time to create a Gantt chart:

Edit this Gantt Chart Example

Use Automated Task Management Software

With Visual Paradigm, you can Keep the development activities in Tasifier, an agile friendly task management tool. Tasifier keeps your tasks, related artifacts and the discussion among developers in one single platform.

Roundtrip synchronizing with Gantt chart

Your team can also interrelate the Gantt chart and Tasifier by synchronizing them. Changes you made in any side will instantly reflect in the other side, which provides a significant advantage for you to understand the tasks being managed from different angles.