Gantt Chart Construction for Beginners

When you have to manage projects that are related to different fields, the Gantt chart proves to be a very good tool that can help you. As a manager, you can get a bird's eye view of the complete project with the chart. This makes it easy to spot the critical errors, request the completed task and provide it to other tasks that depend on it, and manage the processing of incomplete tasks. The chart can be used to plan and schedule the project and aids the managers to take important decisions. Project management will get easier if you have the chart as a reference for the tasks of your project.

The following steps help you to construct the Gantt chart quickly:

Make a list of all the tasks that should be completed in order to consider the project as finished. Let us take the example of a band recording project, in which practicing, recording, mixing, editing, etc. are the single tasks that needed to be completed for the project to be finished.

While making the list, be sure to make it in the order of their dependency, that is, if a task is a prerequisite of another task, then the first task should be listed above the later task. In the example above, the practicing or rehearsing task should be completed before the recording task. Similarly editing and mixing should follow the recording task. So, while preparing the Gantt chart for the above project, the order of the tasks should be like this: practicing, recording, editing and mixing. This ordering creates a nice, orderly flow from top-left to bottom-right that's easy for people to view and understand quickly.

Design a Gantt chart with the help of computer programs or just graph papers. On the left-hand side of the chart, vertically list all of the tasks in the project. The time needed for the project can be represented on a horizontal bar on the top of the graph. The total time should be divided into units of days, weeks or months depending on the length of the project. A horizontal bar to the right of each task should represent the amount of work completed in that specific task.

Design a secondary model for the chart. In this secondary model, the tasks should be represented in order of their dependency to other tasks. Taking the example of band recording further, rehearsing should come before recording while mixing should be listed after recording. The second chart should also have resource allocation details. With this information, the team can make sure that resources selected for one task are not used by another task.

The final Gantt chart can be developed with the help of the second model. The chart should be neat and your colleagues must be able to understand the details easily. With such a chart, you can provide information on the schedule and responsibilities of the tasks to the employees. The chart should also identify the tasks that are lagging behind and the tasks that are being completed as per the schedule, thus helping with the task management.

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