Gantt Chart : The Most Powerful Tool For Project Planning
Charts are powerful tools commonly used to show visual representation of project management timelines by creating task names, start dates, durations and other activities that occur in the process.
Gantt chart has been one of the most favorite charts to be used by project managers to keep track of the activities and deliverables. It presents the amount of the work done, the resources, or the production completed in certain periods of time in relation to the amount of planned for those duration.
The Use of Gantt Chart
Gantt chart is a bar graph which indicates the detailed Work Breakdown and illustrates the start and finish dates of terminal elements of the project. Its complexity depends on the size of projects. It may become more complex when applied to a larger project. Microsoft Excel can be used when creating Gantt template. Further, there are a lot of Gantt chart templates available online. It is an essential tool for tracking tasks involved in the software development cycle.
Creating Your Own Project Gantt Chart
A person who would want to create his own chart may explore the web and may discover a lot of templates to take as a model. The most important thing is to identify first the purpose of the chart to use. Anyone may create a chart from scratch, but it is more convenient to modify an existing model through Microsoft and other third-party companies.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Gantt Charts
The main advantage of using Gantt chart is making the project appear more comprehensible. There are instances that it is hard to grasp the meaning of documents that sets out a project. Creating a Gantt chart is a technique to provide a pictorial method of project management. The goal is to make complex things simpler and clearer for the people involved in the project. However, too much complexity of the chart produces information overload and people will feel pressured. Next, the size of the bar does not equate to the amount of work. More so, it needs to be updated regularly to catch up with the changes happening in the process. Lastly, it is difficult to see on a sheet of paper, and requires a lot of “cut and paste” and can be very time consuming.
Conclusion
Gantt chart is proven to be one of the most effective ways to represent a project. It makes the work of a manager easier and plays an important role to plan execution. It serves as a guide on how to accomplish the tasks at given set of time.it helps the people to completely understand the stages that they will go through before they can finish the project. There is graphical representation of how each project resource has been allocated and scheduled. But, one of the drawbacks it could bring is it could be very complex if the project is too big. The chart may be difficult to read and comprehend. Most companies hire project managers to handle the various details of the project. The project management team should also be sensitive to the expectations and due dates.
