Think about how challenging it would be to juggle a dozen balls at once. You’d have to keep your eye on all of them, and know when to catch each one. If you missed just one, this could spoil your whole performance.
Project management is similar to this. To complete a project successfully, you must control a large number of activities, and ensure that they’re completed on schedule. If you miss a deadline or finish a task out of sequence, there could be knock-on effects on the rest of the project. It could deliver late as a result, and cost a lot more. That’s why it’s helpful to be able to see everything that needs to be done, and know, at a glance, when each activity needs to be completed.
Gantt charts convey this information visually. They outline all of the tasks involved in a project, and their order, shown against a timescale. This gives you an instant overview of a project, its associated tasks, and when these need to be finished.
In this article, we’ll look at why they are so useful, and we’ll see how you can use them to organize projects and keep your team informed of progress.
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