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Article Series - Using Gantt Charts
The readers' comments on my last two day's postings on Gantt charts have helped me get my thoughts together for a longer up-coming project tip. In the meantime, I'll share these thoughts.
Gantt charts are snapshots of the state of a project. They leave open to interpretation the basic question everyone has about projects, "How is the project going?" The question requires an opinion. A snapshot is a poor basis for an opinion. We want to look across time to provide grounding for an assessment.
People can read a Gantt chart without training.
Progress updates on Gantt charts are misleading. The second question everyone asks is, "When will the project finish?" While done might mean "done", 60% complete doesn't tell you anything about how much time is required to finish the other 40%. If it were just one activity that was 60% complete we might have some idea about the impacts to other activities. As soon as there are more than one activity in a state of incompletion, the compound effects of dependence and variation make it far too difficult to predict when the project will finish using the Gantt information alone.
To recap, Gantt charts do a poor job of answering the two questions we all have about projects. So why do we keep using Gantt charts? The simple answer is it is the convention. We prepare and update these charts for meetings. Meetings with clients. Meetings with managers. And meetings with project staff. And what do we do at these meetings? We tell stories and give explanations about the project using the Gantt chart as the prop.
Don't give up on Gantt charts yet. Conventions prevail in part because there is utility for the people who follow the convention. The basic utility is that people can read a Gantt chart. They can do so without training. It is the basic ability to read a Gantt chart that argues for their continued use. How? You'll have to wait for that. I've got some more thinking to do!
Tags: projectplanning, projectscheduling, Gantt
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My experience is that Gantt charts (or network charts) give the impression of communiciation, but do not provide useful management content or enable decision making; so they appear to inform, but in fact provide no real report.
I think that meaningful project reports are about the target and predicted dates of milestones. For our projects we set up milestones: important project events, such as completing a deliverable, or a major work component leading to a deliverable, and set target dates for them. Then we ask project managers to provide ‘predicted’ dates for each milestone. The predicted date is the date they really think the milestone event will occur on. The prediction must flow on to subsequent milestones and the completion date: negotiation takes place then on resources, or obtaining agreement to date changes. PMs are tracked on their milestone delivery performance, acknowledging that slippage is usually an organisational problem, not an individual’s under-performance.
David,
Add to the bottom of the Gantt the Earned Value numbers as described in any EIA-748-B and DOD Earned Value training guide and you’ll have solved this problem in the way $100B of development projects do every year in the defense industry.
All those performance problems you’ve described above are domain independent and occur everywhere I’ve managed projects – software, hardware, environmental, operations… Defining accountability, identifying personal and team performance and identifying the deliverables, capabilities and outcomes in the Plan is the starting point. The schedule is NOT the Plan though. The Plan is the strategy for delivering the value to the stakeholder. The current approach in many industries is to employee the IMP/IMS (Integrated Master Plan / Integrated Master Schedule) paradigm, along with Capabilities Based Planning to discover what is it we’d like the participants to be accountable for other than spending money and passing time
Links to this approach available on request…