What Is A Gantt Chart?

How do you get a bird's eye level view of everything that's going on in a project? What you're looking for is an overview of the various stakeholders, concurrent tasks, and corresponding deadlines.

In this week's video, I talk about how the Gantt Chart helps project managers track tasks, milestones, and stakeholders. While a chart like this might have too much information for an executive, this is a helpful tool to keep project managers organized.

Gantt Chart Tools

Asana https://asana.com

Instagantt + Asana https://asana.com/apps/instagantt

Project Manager https://www.projectmanager.com/

Transcription

Hi it's Xavier Chang Principal of XC Consulting.

Today, we're back with another episode of Xcel with Xavier and today we're talking about the Gantt Chart.

The Gantt chart is a project management tool that managers love to use when looking at their project from a 30,000 foot view. In the Gantt chart, you can see visually start and end dates, task names, and also if there's any overlap between different tasks. It is a popular tool in project management and I'm going to walk you through a couple of examples to give you just a overview as to what this looks like and what you can expect to see in a Gantt chart.

So going to Asana. Asana is a project management software. They've got an app integration called Instagantt, and that's free, I believe. And with this, you can actually have Gantt charts with Asana. I'm not exactly sure why Asana doesn't have Gantt charts already baked into the program, but you can download this integration.

From this screenshot you can see that here in the middle, you've got your task names, everything from pricing model to tiers, design, test price tiers, and then you've got your start and end date. This is very typical in a Gantt chart. Also there's that start date of February 29th and the end date of March 4th. Now, when you look over to the right, this is the real power of the Gantt chart because you get the 30,000 foot view as to what the project looks like over several weeks or several months. You start here all the way on the left with this first red bar and it ends as the weeks go on. Across the top, you've got the week numbers and then all the way going into the next year. These bars that you see are the duration of the task. If the task is spanning multiple months, this bar is going to be longer, of course. And these diamonds, these are typically milestones, various milestones in a project lifecycle. Here in this example, it's a preannouncement, then an announcement, and then launch. Those are the three main milestones as to what the team is working towards. That's one example.

I'm going to go to another website, Project Manager, and it's very similar. In this first column, you've got your task names like on site meetings, discussion with stakeholders. Across the top, if you go over to the right, you've got your weeks and your months. This is the date component. And then you see below that you've got the various bars. One thing that I like to mention is that sometimes tasks overlap that's natural in any type of project. And this is something you can visually see very quickly in a Gantt chart. For any given week, if there's overlap, that means that things are happening concurrently.

If you're a project manager, you're juggling multiple stakeholders, multiple tasks. This is a very key tool that you need just to keep everything straight in your head. This may not be as useful for, the folks that are doing the work or for management that really just needs the high level bullet points as to where a project is. This is purely for the project manager. So that person that is managing the various stakeholders, they have informal management responsibilities across the team and then also are responsible for making sure that things get done on time.

That was a bit about the Gantt chart.

It can be very useful depending on what your role is in the team.

It could also be way too much information, either if your leadership or if you're just focused on doing a couple of those various tasks that are in a project.

Hope you thought this was helpful. If you did, please give me a like for this video and consider subscribing to my channel. And I will see you next week.

Thanks for watching another episode of Xcel with Xavier. I've got new episodes coming out every Thursday morning. Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel to receive notifications of new content Thanks again, and I hope to see you again next time.