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The Gantt Chart

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


We are working through a series of blogs, looking at some of the essential models that a project manager will need. We are covering:

 


The Gantt Chart is like a non-identical twin of the Network Chart which we saw last week. It contains all of the same information, but displays it in a different way.

The Gantt Chart is named after Henry Gantt, who did not invent it. As far as I can find (Wikipedia seems clear on this), it was invented some twenty years before Gantt re-invented it by Polish engineer and economist, Karol Adamiecki. Writing in Polish, of course, and calling it a harmonogram , would never endear it to Anglophone engineers and managers, who, if they had heard of it, would probably have thought Harmonogram too effete and musical-sounding a term. Gantt Chart has an air of brutality to its sound and Gantt was a thoroughgoing American.

Building a Gantt Chart

Anyway, let’s convert last week’s network chart into a Gantt Chart.

First, we draw two axes:

  • on one, put a time scale
  • on the other, list all of the tasks

Now, starting with the first task, represent each one by a bar. Make the length of the bar represent the duration of the task, and place it to represent its scheduling, as driven by the sequencing and dependencies of your network chart: voila!

First, here is our Network Chart

Critical Path on a Network Diagram

Now, let’s translate this into Gantt Chart format…

Gantt Chart

And it really is as simple as that… until your project gets large and complex.

Further Reading

From the Management Pocketbooks series:

  1. Project Management Pocketbook

 

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