If you are a project manager or a business owner or interested in project management, then you have probably heard the term Gantt chart. Gantt chart is a system through which you can stop miscommunication and bring your projects right in its tracks. In fact, Gantt charts are a cornerstone of any project management and a great tool to keep your team on track. So, what a Gantt chart is, why you should use Gantt chart, and what are reasons; Gantt chart can help your business to be profitable.
What is Gantt chart?
Gantt chart is a popular tool for planning and scheduling projects and serves as an aid for the project managers to schedule project activities and monitor project progress over time by comparing the planned progress with the actual work progress. Gantt charts are like bar charts with dates that mark the start and finish dates of the parts of a project. They are laid out in order when a task needs to be completed.
Why you should use Gantt chart
When you start to set up your task in Gant chart you should think all the tasks that are involved in your project. Such as, responsibilities for each task, length of the task that will take, and probably the potential problems that your project team might face. When you schedule your tasks in detailed and thinking of the right people for the right task, you will work out all the potential issues and problems before you begin your project.
Gantt charts also help you to find out the physical progress of your project like how much time it takes to deliver your project to your client, which of your task has to be started first or subsequently start more than one task and get completed on the same time or you can find out the critical path of your project and process your project task accordingly.
So, here are 10 reasons why you should use Gantt chart for managing your project.
Pictorial Representation of Complex Project
Complex projects like large construction companies require and have huge tasks to be done and get completed. They run multiple projects at the same time which requires a lot of tasks to be managed and monitored.
Gantt chart gives your project whether it may be a complex construction project, it can give you a profitable solution for your project processes, tasks, and activities, can well define your project and Gantt charts are so designed to minimize both your initial capital costs and ongoing project operating expenses.
DEPENDENCIES – Set Predecessor Successor
You can easily set up Predecessor or Successor for each of your tasks. And also define Lag (free time) between 2 different task. By which you can easily determine which of your task has to begin first or which one to start, before completion of other tasks.
Milestone
The presentation tools of Gantt charts enable users to see key milestones of a project. This ability to illustrate milestones helps project managers to know important deadlines and targets either for project delivery or for the purpose of billing.
Prevent Resource Overload
Using Gantt chart you have plan your resources for single or multiple projects at the same time, so you can have a clear view and track who you are going to need when and for what which project, you can find if you have got enough people, is there enough of your time or enough people in your team available for the project.
You can add up the resource profile from each of the Gantt charts to make sure that you have got enough people to do all the projects that are coming up. In fact, you can also think about the order that you are going to do them and decide on the priorities of all of your upcoming projects.
Add Flexibility To Changes
Business working purely on a task management system does understand that it is hard to re-adjust a task once created. Sometimes it is hard for a task to move its position from one position to another. All these issues are resolved by using Gantt chart. Gantt chart lets users readjust a task position and also its timelines.
It also lets the entire dependent task in the project gets readjusted.
Time Management
Project time management is one of the areas for project managers. It’s the discipline of project management that looks at controlling the amount of time it takes to do the work. With a limited amount of available resources, it is the job of the project manager to stay on top of the project to manage the limited resources in given time. In a time-bound project, any additional time project manager may take, it will cost to the business and ultimate success of the project.
Faster communication across the team
Gantt chart lets everyone know who is doing what at what time. Gantt chart shows how a task is related to one another, in other words, they force their creators to figure out the sequence of tasked events and assignments. It makes your communication much easier and flexible by showing everybody what your project plan is and what is their part and role to play in that plan.
Critical Path & Network
The longest sequence of activities in a project plan which has to be completed on time before the completion of a project due date is known as a critical path.
Gantt chart directly identifies the critical path and also visualize the workflow (In TIEMCHART) which enable you to find the critical path and understand which task to be started first. Gantt chart shows you the critical activities which cannot be started unless its predecessor activity is completed.
Calculate Free Float
Free float is directly connected to the path and if your project network diagram has to say x non-critical paths then your project has X floats. Gantt chart has advanced decision-making tools that can predict you in advance like free float, critical paths, early start, late start, etc. and help you in finding the combined free float values of all activities in a path.
Monitor your project easily
Monitoring a project has always been a difficult task for every project managers. Gantt chart lets you observe your project performances and checked various project variations with respect to your project plan and keep yourself up-to-date.
Monitoring and controlling are much easier and can be done within a minimum time frame and you can have a real-time view of your project progress that everything is fine or some of your projects are running late.
Conclusion
On your ongoing project, you can simply keep updating your chart and also you can inform your team members accordingly about your project progress time to time about any issues, problem or any schedule changes during the ongoing project. All these factors will help deliver your project on time and within budget.
Gantt charts have been used for a long time and are improving and advancing daily. There is no any shortage of project management software in the market that offers advanced Gantt charts. But choosing the right tool for the right project is the key to success for every project.
