Working With Gantt Charts

Gantt chart, is one of the most popular forms of project planning. Whilst many users use MS Project to undertake their planning activities, this does introduce some complexities and a lack of flexibility into the planning process. A popular alternative is to use Excel templates which provide greater flexibility in designing your project and its associated visual layout. It combines the multiple tasks of a project into one document and also gives a clear graphical representation of the timeframes specific to each task. During the project you can easily see the status of your workers and their activities on a single sheet. Using Gantt charts, an organization can effectively decrease its meetings as all the information is pre planned and given in the Gantt chart. It also keeps the workers and administration focused to their task as Gantt chart provides them with deadline and timeframe.

Firstly, provide the required input data for your project to Gantt chart template. The template makes it very simple to seek the task dates and associated dependencies. Pre-programmed excel formula’s enable you to seek the time window you are interested in very quickly by just updating the project start date. Then it is the responsibility of the template to give the required bars and calculated values of different tasks. We can change the date of any of our task during the project progress. Thus it gives a wide range of flexibility to your tasks and helpful in monitoring the status of the project.

In making Gantt chart we give each task an estimated length of time and also assign its status that whether it is parallel or sequential. If the task is parallel then it means that it is an independent task and doesn’t depend on any on any other activities occurring. Where if it is a sequential task than it means that it is a dependent task we have to give the number of paths on which it depends. Once your input data has been enter, ChartGantt gives a visualization of the whole project and gives a timeframe corresponding to each of the task. These timeframes will also show the starting and ending date of each duty.

In the last step of making Gantt chart template, you have to present your chart in a more suitable way by redrawing it and give it a more decent look. Make sure that parallel tasks are shown together and sequential tasks are effectively showing their dependency. Here you also need to check the resources allocated to each activity and you have to make sure that your distribution of resources among the activities are balanced and you have properly implemented the optimization technique for the allocation of resources.