Handling Projects Using Gantt Charts

A Gantt chart might be simply the most popular tool utilized in project management. A Gantt chart gives project managers a simple glance of the whole project, because of the way it shows the duration of the tasks, the order that they need to be completed in, dependencies between selected project responsibilities, and above all, the present status or progress of the tasks. Think of Gantt charts being a graphical timeline which has a marker corresponding to the date today. This will highlight what has already been done, what is currently in the works, and what still should be accomplished for the project to become known to be complete. Project managers can certainly spot crucial nodes inside of their project, for them to be able to address a difficulty before they even happen. The first Gantt charts were nothing more than papers with graphs, with dates slated on the top right, and tasks slated downward. Colored lines were then drawn across the horizontal graph to relate to task schedules. The Gantt charts of today primarily incorporate a horizontal axis which signifies time, whether it is days, weeks or months; along with a vertical axis which is seen as a list of the project responsibilities and activities. The schedule of every task is then displayed with a bar placed on the horizontal plane adjacent to the task. The start and stop locations of these bars represent the actual start and end dates of each task or activity. An indicator for the current date could possibly be available, that may help project administrators spot which activities are not done on time. During the late 1890s, Karol Adamiecki, a Polish steelworks engineer, first got the notion of this style of chart. It was in the 1910s, however, that a social engineer from America, Henry Gantt, developed a somewhat similar technique. This style then came to be called after him, and came to be the Gantt chart that we know and employ in projects today.