Effective Gantt Chart in project management

I once participated in a large project to build an Accounting Shared Service Center for one of Poland’s largest companies. The complexity required establishing several project teams dealing with accounting processes, preparation, and equipping the location, IT, and HR. In total, the project involved about 50 people!

Our project planning journey reached a crucial point during a meeting, where the Project Manager presented the project plan in a format that was visually appealing and highly practical- a Gantt chart. This meticulously detailed roadmap, printed on a particular plotter and displayed on a rack, offered a comprehensive view of the project’s timeline and tasks. It was a game-changer, revolutionizing our ability to track the project’s progress and coordinate our efforts more efficiently.

The Project Manager was proud of the “masterpiece” he had created; no one present had ever seen a more extensive project plan. However, the initial enthusiasm and pride in the Gantt chart’s comprehensiveness were quickly replaced by problems in using it for effective project management.

Many years have passed since then, during which I have had the opportunity to manage at least a dozen large projects – such as building information systems, designing strategies for large companies, projects on optimizing processes in companies, developing and implementing methodologies and systems for managing controlling projects in large capital groups, etc. Based on my own experience, analysis of the books I have read, professional studies, and articles, the following conclusions emerge regarding the effectiveness of using the Gantt chart in project management.

Gantt Chart in project management-essential tips

Before you proceed to create a Gantt Chart, make sure that you have a precise understanding of the project’s purpose, scope, and deliverables, or in other words, the products that the project should provide.

Observing various project teams, one can see that they proceed to build the project plan/schedule in the form of a Gantt chart; often, this is done without a thorough understanding of what the project should ultimately deliver.

Nevertheless, it is possible to build a “good-looking” but content-poor Gantt chart – it has defined tasks, milestones, links between tasks, assigned responsibility, etc. – it looks professional. The problem, however, is that:

it isn’t easy to verify that all the tasks shown on the schedule are needed,
it’s hard to confirm whether all the tasks needed to achieve the project goal exist.

The target visible through the fog is difficult to navigate; it is not sharp. The same is true for project execution. Seeing the project goal in a foggy form makes creating a good Gantt chart impossible. The problem is that project teams must fully realize this and start the project with a schedule created this way.

Relatively quickly, for example, it can turn out that the schedule needs to be modified because, after the first so-called Business Project Review, the project sponsor or management finds that their idea was a little different and begins to articulate it. At that point, the project manager and his team update the Gantt chart, and, most likely, it turns out that a lot of work has gone to waste. As a result, we’ve committed resources to unnecessary tasks, meaning we’ve incurred pointless costs. It’s also possible that we’ve delayed the project, and what’s worse, motivation in the team drops.

This could easily have been avoided by spending more time at the outset to define and understand the purpose and scope of the project well. An almost magical question that solves a lot but is rarely asked is, “What is not in the scope of the project?”. It is often easier to understand a project’s scope by discussing what is not. Now imagine updating a “big” Gantt chart, hanging it on a hanger, reprinting it – a lot of frustrating and unnecessary work – and yet this is not the way to go.

The Gantt Chart is used to manage the project plan; it should be clear and should not show single activities or small tasks.

I want to return for a moment to the example cited at the beginning of the article. A “big” Gantt chart hung on a map hanger is impractical. It is too complicated to manage a project with it. This is because the Project Manager has assumed that the more the Gantt shows all, even small tasks, the more precise and effective it will be.

In practice, the effect is precisely the opposite. Such a schedule will require permanent changes. It won’t be easy to track individual tasks’ statuses. Quite quickly, it will become more of a “crutch” than a tool, helping to bring the project to completion successfully. An alternative is to build a Gantt chart that focuses on the “big” tasks, and the so-called subtasks or individual activities are in the details of the main task – they are not visible on the Gantt chart. The advantage of such an approach is that the schedule is highly readable and, as a result, requires fewer significant changes, making it a more stable project roadmap.

In addition, we only make a so-called baseline (plan) for essential tasks and monitor deviations visible to the sponsor, other stakeholders, the project manager, and the task owner. At the level of crucial tasks, regular discussions occur about the condition of the project, its problems, and required decisions. As for the subtasks above, or activities, they are defined by the task owners and assigned to various team members. This way, the task owner becomes a “mini” project manager and manages a “mini” project team, depending on the task scale. This approach works well in practice.

Use a good tool to create a professional Gantt Chart

It’s 2024, and from everywhere, we are surrounded by IT applications designed for various purposes. Some tools allow you to create a Gantt chart – there may not be as many of them as, for example, personal time or budget management applications, but there are – for better or worse. Many project managers build a simple Gantt chart using MS Excel. Some companies encapsulate Excell with a fair amount of VBA code and achieve decent results. Still, compared to professional, technology-developed programs, these are significantly weaker and less functional.

Apart from Excel, the best tools for project teams to create a Gantt chart are, for example, MS Project or FlexiProject. At the same time, they are better integrated with other aspects of project management—such as the Project Charter, project budget, risks, comments, and discussions in working teams.