Project Management tool: Gantt Chart

This article is related to Advanced Engineering Project, Program and Portfolio Management course. The aim of the article is the description of the Gantt chart as a tool for Project management, the method, applications, advantages and limitations will be explain.

Big idea

The first Gantt chart was devised in the mid 1890s by Karol Adamiecki, a Polish engineer who ran a steelworks in southern Poland and had become interested in management ideas and techniques. Some 15 years after Adamiecki , Henry Gantt, an American engineer and management consultant, devised his own version of the chart and it was this that became widely known and popular in western countries. Consequently it was Henry Gantt whose name was to become associated with charts of this type.

Henry Gantt- http://www2.open.ac.uk/openlearn/business_thinkers_static/people/gantt.html

Concept

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To complete a project successfully, you must control a large number of activities, and ensure that they're completed on schedule. If you miss a deadline or finish a task out of sequence, there could be knock-on effects on the rest of the project. It could deliver late as a result, and cost a lot more. That's why it's helpful to be able to see everything that needs to be done, and know, at a glance, when each activity needs to be completed.

Gantt charts convey this information visually. They outline all of the tasks involved in a project, and their order, shown against a timescale. This gives you an instant overview of a project, its associated tasks, and when these need to be finished.

Description

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State of the art

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Originally Gantt charts were prepared laboriously by hand; each time a project changed it was necessary to amend or redraw the chart and this limited their usefulness, continual change being a feature of most projects. Nowadays, however, with the advent of computers and project management software, Gantt charts can be created, updated and printed easily.

Unfortunately, Gantt charts are more complex than they initially seem. They are inefficient, if hand-drawn — no one wants to keep manually updating a moving chart as tasks are completed — and require skills in resource allocation, task-dependency management, and team collaboration.