Business Bites: Gantt Charts and Project Timelines
This week Sara gives us a Business Bite on Gantt Charts and Project Timelines. Project timelines help us think about dates that are critical. A Gantt chart is typically a horizontal representation of a project with line items and overlapping bars, showing how long each task is going to take. It’s important to know how much work and dependencies need to be done in which order. By using a Gantt chart, effort and duration can be reflected. Hear more from the podcast with new episodes weekly!
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Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. This week we're going to be talking about Gantt charts and timelines, both true staples of project management.
When you get ready to initiate on a project or a big task that you would need to do, the first thing that you probably start thinking of is the individual pieces and parts that you need to complete. Those are great and wildly important, but the second step you probably get to is the actual timeline. What are the dates you need to hit? When are you going to get this done by? Do you need to do some backward planning as a process of it? When are you going to be hitting specific milestones? What are the goals along the way? Again, dates are critical when we're thinking about what the overall project timeline is.
Now, a timeline on the surface is a listing out of the different dates. What's the start date? What's the end date? Where are the key posts along the way? What you could call milestones depending on the project work that you're doing. This is different than a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is typically a horizontal representation of the project, with line items and overlapping bars showing how long each of the specific tasks is going to take.
For example, you may have some tasks that do not overlap. I finish one, then I move on to the other, then I move on to the other. But you may have other tasks that could be done simultaneously. So it's important to know which are those tasks so I can think about how much work I need to do. This first comes into when we're thinking about not only the dates, which are those key posts for us, but what are the predecessors or the dependencies for this project.
For example, if I'm going to be preparing dinner, I can't get the sauce ready until I've already made the pasta. So, perhaps I need to prep the pasta first, but I can be starting to get the sauce ready while the pasta's cooking. Now, if you have done a little bit of cooking, you know that cooking sauce takes a different time than cooking pasta. And so you were probably going to want to start the sauce before because give or take your pasta warming up is going to be what, 10 minutes?
And when we're thinking about these together, it's not just which one needs to happen first, but how long each of them takes. Because I don't want to make the pasta then start work on my sauce and by the time I'm done with the sauce, my pasta is cold. But it's thinking about these steps and understanding which ones are dependent on each other, which ones can happen at the same time, and which ones need to end one before the other, etc. There are a lot of very clear distinctions you can make and connections between each of the subtasks, but again, thinking broadly about which steps actually follow each other and need others to be finished before it or after it.
After you start thinking about that, then we get into duration, right? This may be different than the actual effort you're going to put into it. Let's say I'm making ice cream. The actual work I need to do is probably 15 minutes of effort, but the duration is perhaps six hours overnight in the fridge. Those are different things and require a different amount of energy, but I also have to plan for it.
And so when we're thinking about effort and duration, your Gantt chart is going to reflect that for you to be able to accurately estimate and understand how long that project is going to take. When you've put in the dates, you've put in your predecessor's, you've taken the time to think about effort and duration, what ends up forming on your Gantt chart is what's called the critical path.
This is the path that if anything happens along the way, if we experience a delay in one of these key areas, one of these items that may be dependent on something else or holding up something else, then we have an issue. Now, there are some things that if you're running late on or if things are running behind, it's not that big of an issue. You've got extra time.
But there are some tasks that if you miss this date, it's not going out at the specific time that you wanted. And so understanding which of the components on your project timeline are a part of that critical path, the immovable path, then you'll actually know whether you're on time, you're on target, and if you're going to meet this project goal.
When you are thinking about that critical path, again, once you've identified it, then the best thing to do is add in a little bit of slack. Slack is adding some space into your project timeline to ensure that you know what, the unexpected always is expected. So how do we build in a little bit of buffer just to make sure that we're going to be actually able to complete this? You know what, in an ideal scenario, this task does need to take two weeks to get back to us, but you know what, it is their busy time, let's add an additional week just in case.
I'd rather be ahead of schedule than behind schedule. And so with the data that we now have from the critical path and adding in this slack, we have a true sense of what the real project is. Again, understanding each of these small distinctions is one step in the process to ensure that your project will actually be achieved the way you want it.
A timeline is a great place to start, and you'll determine whether or not you need the detail of a Gantt chart, but it can be so helpful to truly understand all the pieces and parts of a particular project, and how much work you're actually going to need to do at the end of the day.
This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you and what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.
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