How to use a Gantt chart

Category: Project Management

Type: Workshop

Title: How to use a Gantt chart

Introduction:

How to use a Gantt chart. To be efficient in planning your work is a Workshop performed for a community organization. (Participant guide available)

Content:

Introduction

The world of projects management provides many tools and methodologies to facilitate the work of professionals every day. There are 5 phases in a project life cycle: initiating, planning, executing monitoring or controlling, and closing. Among these, planning is one of the most important since it gives the structure of the management duty necessary to make the product or the service comes into reality. Whether or not your organization is set to develop its own project management procedures, using planning in your work is a powerful way to enhance your productivity and spare time for what you like the most and is the core of your motivation. Our purpose here is not to give you all the knowledge on project planning which is broad but to habilitate you to start using different work strategy by being proficient with planning software such as Viewpath. Project planning with software is more a knowhow that can be adapt to any kind of situation. After this session you will be able to take control of your workload and add one more skill to your career path…

Content of the workshop

• What do I need to plan?
• What is planning?
• What is a Gantt chart?
• How to start? – the basic exercises
• How to be proficient? – operation exercises
• How to spare time? – some tricks
• The final application.

What do I need to plan?

• In order to manage your work you need to ensure that desired objectives are met.
• If you don’t know where you are, you can’t have control on your work: The pain curves.
• The counterintuitive thoughts: “I have no time to plan; I need to get the job done!”. Example: you are late for a meeting in a place that you don’t know, and you have a plane to take after.
• Planning facilitates your work.
• “Failing to plan is planning to fail”.

What is planning?

• The objectives of project planning is to completely define all work required so that it will be easy to review and controls.
• There are two steps in planning: planning activities and the “tracking” or monitoring of the planned activities.
• Planning must be systematic, flexible and iterative. It takes discipline!!!

What is a Gantt chart?

• The Gantt chart is the most common type of display named for Henry Gantt who first utilized this procedure in the early 1900s.
• The bar chart is a means of displaying simple activities or events plotted against time or dollars.
• An activity represents the amount of work required to proceed from one point in time to another. Events are usually set as milestones.
• Gantt charts are simple to construct, read and share. They are good to show progress.

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How to start?

• Use the information in your plan of action.
• (or) Build a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
• Build your Gantt chart:

1. Set the workdays
2. List the resources
3. Enter the tasks
4. Order and level
5. Link the tasks

The basic exercises

What you will learn:

• Use the information in your plan of action.
• Build a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
• Build your first Gantt chart.

How to be proficient?

• Use your experience
• Manage your Gantt chart:

1. Define the amount of work needed
2. The type of links
3. The buffers and milestones
4. The invitations
5. Overview of the options

Operation exercises

What you will learn:

• Use your experience
• Manage your Gantt chart

How to spare time?

• Leverage your resources
• Don’t recreate the wheel:

1. Build templates
2. Lessons learn
3. Go further (accelerate, critical path, baseline), risk, cost)
4. Stay professional
5. Share ideas with colleagues

Some tricks

What you will learn:

• Leverage your resources
• Don’t recreate the wheel

The final application

• Welcome to the real world:
• Start planning your work!!!

Don’t stress! I will be assisting you for the beginning.

Conclusion

Planning is a tool to facilitate the reporting and the follow up of your actions every day. In the reality of a project, the project manager is in charge of planning the project according to the information from persons who achieve the work package. Then he or she controls how the project goes on to meet the objective. The control is exercised y by comparing where you are to where you are supposed to be so that corrective action can be taken when there is deviation. Now you have control on your work!

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