What is a visual diagram displayed as a bar chart that depicts the projects tasks against the projects time frame?

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This web site is designed to provide information about Gantt charts that will help you create and benefit from them.

This web site is designed to provide information about Gantt charts that will help you create and benefit from them.

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A Gantt chart, commonly used in project management, is one of the most popular and useful ways of showing activities (tasks or events) displayed against time. On the left of the chart is a list of the activities and along the top is a suitable time scale. Each activity is represented by a bar; the position and length of the bar reflects the start date, duration and end date of the activity. This allows you to see at a glance:

• What the various activities are
• When each activity begins and ends
• How long each activity is scheduled to last
• Where activities overlap with other activities, and by how much
• The start and end date of the whole project

To summarize, a Gantt chart shows you what has to be done (the activities) and when (the schedule).

The first Gantt chart was devised in the mid 1890s by Karol Adamiecki, a Polish engineer who ran a steelworks in southern Poland and had become interested in management ideas and techniques.

Some 15 years after Adamiecki, Henry Gantt, an American engineer and project management consultant, devised his own version of the chart and it was this that became widely known and popular in western countries. Consequently, it was Henry Gantt whose name was to become associated with charts of this type.

Originally Gantt charts were prepared laboriously by hand; each time a project changed it was necessary to amend or redraw the chart and this limited their usefulness, continual change being a feature of most projects. Nowadays, however, with the advent of computers and project management software, Gantt charts can be created, updated and printed easily.

Karol Adamiecki

Henry Gantt

Today, Gantt charts are most commonly used for tracking project schedules. For this it is useful to be able to show additional information about the various tasks or phases of the project, for example how the tasks relate to each other, how far each task has progressed, what resources are being used for each task and so on.

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PERT and Gantt charts are visualization tools that are often used in project management. Both of these charts are used for task scheduling, controlling, and administering the tasks necessary for the completion of a project. The difference between them is that a PERT chart is a kind of network diagram, while a Gantt chart is a bar chart.

What is the PERT Chart?

PERT Chart is an acronym for (Program Evaluation and Review Technique). A PERT chart is a project management tool used to schedule, organize, and coordinate tasks within a project. It is a method to analyze the tasks involved in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project.

What is a Gantt Chart?

A Gantt chart is a type of horizontal bar chart commonly used in project management, which is a visual view of tasks scheduled overtime. It provides a graphical visualization of a schedule that helps to plan, coordinate, and track specific tasks (or elements) in a project.

Gantt chart boils down multiple tasks and timelines into a single page. Using a Gantt chart allows all stakeholders to perceive the same schedule information, sets mutually understood expectations, and conducts their efforts according to the desired protocol. The Gantt chart tool provides a visual timeline for the start and end of tasks, making it clear how tasks are interrelated and perhaps rely on the completion of another before one can start.

PERT vs Gantt Chart

PERT charts are network diagrams that use boxes to represent tasks and arrows to present dependencies between tasks. The boxes are laid out from left to right, but there is no fixed Y-axis with dates. The first box, or root, is centered vertically on the left side, and the subsequent tasks can be drawn anywhere along the Y-axis. Arrows can point to the right, up or down, but never to the left.

Gantt charts are bar graphs. The X-axis contains dates and the Y-axis lists separate tasks. On each line of the Y-axis, the chart depicts a bar positioned to extend from the task’s start date to its end date. Tasks are listed in the start-date order.

PERT vs Gantt Example

A Pert Chart:

The ‘Gantt Chart version” of the PERT Chart above:

Summary

Because the PERT Chart clearly illustrates task dependencies, a PERT chart sometimes is preferred over the Gantt chart (another popular project management charting). While the PERT chart can be harder to interpret, especially for large-scale projects. Most often, project managers use both techniques in order to serve multiple purposes.

On the contrary, a Gantt chart does not show clear dependencies or relationships between tasks and also fails to provide enough information for showing the critical path and as well as the detail information for each of the activities.

We can summarize the differences between the two as listed in the table below: