The need for shanty charting!

Essential Guide to Gantt Charts

What is a Gantt chart?

The Gantt chart is one of the most important project management tools available these days. A Gantt chart is a popular and very useful way of showing activities, tasks or events of a certain project displayed against time. On the vertical axis is the list of activities that need to be completed and on the horizontal is the project timeline. Each timeframe is adjacent to the activity that it is referring to. Each activity is represented by a bar on the Gantt chart. The position and length of the bar represent the start date, duration and the end date of the activity.

The above-given charts allow us to see various important features of the project activities at a glance. These features include:

List of all activities, or project tasks, that make up the whole project

The specific task names

The starting date of each activity

How long a particular activity is scheduled to last

The ending date of each activity

Are there any activities that overlap

Task dependencies (one task must be completed before the next can begin)

The starting and ending of the whole project

The project schedule

History of the Gantt chart

The first Gantt chart was devised by Karol Adamiecki, in the 1890s. Karol was a Polish engineer who ran steelworks and became interested in management ideas and techniques. At that time the Gantt chart did not have its name.

Later in the early 1900s, an American engineer and a management consultant named Henry Gantt devised a different version of the same chart and it was him who the name was to become associated with charts of this type.

In the early days, Gantt charts were created by hand and they took a lot of effort, and if a project got delayed, or extended, the chart had to be drawn all over again. Things became easier with the advent of computers and different project management software tools, which help us create