Learning Gantt Charts

Welcome
Hi. I'm Chris Croft and welcome to this training course on Gantt Charts. They're
probably the most useful project management technique there is. If you're planning or
controlling the implementation of a project of any size, then you'll need to have a Gantt
chart. And yet, they are hugely misunderstood. Most people don't know the easiest way
to produce them and they end up making them too complicated and then they don't fully
use them. Gantt charts can be so great if you use them correctly.
So, on this course, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know about Gantt
charts. I'm going to cover what they are, why they're so useful, how to construct them,
even the most difficult ones, and then we'll take a close look at all of the things you
could use them for. By the end of the course, you'll know all about them and you'll be
able to produce and use them for any project. So, let's get started.

What you should know before watching this course

In the ideal world, you would've already viewed my Lynda course entitled Project
Management Simplified. Where I explain how Gantt charts fit into the larger scheme of
project management. They are, in fact, step six of my 12 step process because, before
you can construct one, you need to have listed out all of your tasks, estimated how long
they will take, and decided on which ones depend on which other ones. But if you
already now about that and you just want to get better at the Gantt side of things, then
feel free to plunge straight into this course.
In fact, even if you're a pretty experienced project manager and have been using Gantt
charts for years, I bet you'll pick up a few useful tips from watching this course. And
those could make all the different on your next multi-million dollar project. Alternatively,
if you know nothing about project management, you could do things in a slightly unusual
order. You could view this course, and if you like it, then watch Project Management
Simplified later and see how your new understanding of Gantt charts will fit into the
bigger picture of managing your projects.

Using the exercise files

To accompany this course, there are a number of PDFs that you can download. These
compliment the graphics that will be coming and going quite fast on your screen. So,
you can print them out and write notes on them or pause the course and examine the
PDFs in a bit more detail if you need to. When you come to plan your real project, you
can then refer to the printed-out PDF notes. Ideally, you would either plan a project as
you go through this course, so that at each stage you can apply the ideas, or you
would've recently drawn a real Gantt chart that you can look at and compare with the
ideal that I'll be describing.
The other option is to absorb all of this course and then quite soon afterwards, you can
go off and draw your own perfect Gantt chart for your real project.
Understanding Gantt charts
Gantt Charts are one of the oldest surviving management tools. They were invented by
an American called Henry Gantt way back in 1910, and it's amazing that in over a
hundred years nobody has come up with something better. It makes me think that
maybe there just isn't anything better. Here's an example of one, and you can see it's
pretty intuitive, you've got dates across the top which can be weeks or months, or even
days, and then the tasks listed down the side.
The bars show how long each task is going to take. Now there are four main uses for a
chart like this. The first one is planning your project. Who is going to do what, how long
will it take to get it all done? You can also plan how many people you'll need, and even
how much money you'll need, as we'll see later. The second reason is explaining the
project to other people. Everyone can see their part in the project, and even if they've
had no training, they know intuitively what they're looking at.
The third reason is montioring whether we're still on schedule or not. This is done by
coloring in the tasks that have been completed so far. Again, more on this later, but I
do just want to stress that there is no other way that's ever been found to monitor the
progress of a project. I had an inquiry from a customer about running a two-day project
management course and I sent them an outline of what I was going to do. And I was a
little bit anxious because they were a company that make wind farms, and the people
who work there are incredibly clever.
They use mathematical modeling to make a 3-D computer image of the mountain, and
they simulate the fluid flow of the air over the mountain, so you can maximize the
energy you get from the turbines. Because if you can get five percent more energy out,
it's worth millions of pounds. So these people, they do lots of math, so they're really
clever. So I thought they were probably going to know everything on my course, but
nevertheless I sent them an outline of what I would do over the two days. And they
emailed back and they said, we think it looks great except you don't need to do Gantt
Charts because we don't use Gantt Charts at our company.
And I thought well that's weird, what do they use instead? They've probably got some
really clever thing that they've invented. So I mailed back, saying okay fine, I'll just miss
out the Gantt Charts. But just out of curiosity, how do you monitor your progress against
your plan? How do you know whether you're still on schedule to finish on time or
not? And there was a week of silence from the other end. And then I got this email back
and it said, okay then, do the Gantt Charts. (laughter) And I thought, yes! But I was a
little bit disappointed as well, because I was hoping they were going to show me
something really clever that they'd invented, but there is nothing else in all the years I've
been teaching this.
Nobody has been able to show me anything better than a Gantt Chart for monitoring
progress. Anyway, finally, the fourth reason why Gantt Charts are great is for
adjusting your plan if things change during your project. Which they inevitably
will. Maybe extra tasks have to be added, maybe the whole plan suddenly needs to be
speeded up, or maybe you're running late and you have to issue an amended plan to
everybody involved. The Gantt Chart makes all of this easy, so in the next section I'm
going to explain how to construct one for your project.
But first I'd like you to just take a moment to think about whether you have a chart like
this for each of your projects, and if not, do you think it would be helpful if you did?

Putting in the critical path

The critical path is the longest path, and that's all it means. I think in the old days, it may
have been called the time critical path, and that's just been shortened now to be just the
critical path. People often misunderstand this, and they think that the tasks on the
critical path are the most difficult or expensive or the most failure-prone tasks. But
they're not. They're just the ones that take the longest time to get done. So you can
have trivial tasks, like routine paperwork, on the critical path, and massive, expensive,
important things that aren't on the critical path.
So the first thing when drawing a Gantt chart is to put in the critical path, and it's always
drawn coming down in steps, like this. By the way, I'm using Excel to draw the Gantt
charts on this course, but with Microsoft Project, it's similar. And later, I'll be giving you
more information on the pros and cons of these two. So, why is it drawn coming down in
steps? Well, the main reason is that you then have everything on its own line. So you
can have extra columns off to the side for who's doing each task, which department
they're in, that sort of thing.
It also means that you can show slippage, what has actually happened compared
with what should have happened. The main area we want to keep an eye on, in terms of
slippage, is the critical path, because any of those tasks going late, means that they'll
push everything else late, and then the whole project will end up being delivered
late. But floating tasks can also be a problem if they end up slipping, if they go so late
that they affect the critical path. Now, something that many people don't realize is that
you can't really draw the Gantt chart unless you already know the critical path, because
everything hangs off it.
And the best way to get the critical path is to do a network diagram, which is one of
these. Quite often produced using Post-its, but you could use a computer to do it. So
basically, you find the critical path by just adding up the times as you go
across. Computers do it by doing something really complicated called a forward and
backward pass. And some people teach that you should do this when you're doing it
manually, but personally, I think that's just not necessary. Keep it simple. Just look at
the diagram. You can easily see what the longest path is.
If you start with a network diagram, and then make it into a Gantt chart, it'll be quicker in
the end than spending ages on your Gantt chart. You'll need about 20 minutes
making the network diagram, probably using the Post-its, and then 10 minutes making it
into a Gantt chart. And that's all you need, half an hour. And it will be correct. If you try
to jump straight to the Gantt chart, you'll miss some dependencies, and maybe get the
wrong critical path. Even Microsoft Project does it in these two stages really, but without
you knowing.
So when you enter tasks straight into the Gantt chart view, it is actually drawing the
network diagram in the background. You can, in fact, you can click and view it if you
want. But although this is clever, I actually think it encourages bad habits. If you let the
computer draw the network diagram rather than doing it yourself, you run the risk of
missing some dependencies, and therefore, getting the wrong critical path. And then,
the foundation of your whole project plan will be wrong. So, for your project, have you
done a network diagram, ideally using Post-its? And then, put in your critical path? Now,
in the next section, we're going to look at some of the more fancy variations you
might need to know when drawing your critical path.
And then, we'll look at completing the Gantt chart by putting in the non-critical tasks.

Drawing double critical paths, overlap, and lead and lag

Next I want to explain a few minor complications that can happen when you're
finding and drawing your critical path. For a start, what if there are two critical
paths? This happens when you have two equal longest paths through your network
diagram. Two tasks, or rows of tasks, that take the same time. And the answer is, it's
easy. You just draw them one above the other like this. Next, what if you have tasks that
you want to overlap a little in order to save time? Overlap can be just shown as it is.
In my example here, I'm modifying my buildings while still waiting for the last furniture
quotations to come in. You just show the rectangles overlapping. But often a better way
to show overlap is to granulate the task, which means cut them up into smaller
parts. The reason for this, is that when you overlap things, you need to know
exactly when the second one can start. At what point halfway through the first task can
we start the second one? So you draw this by either dividing the first or the second task.
I'll just give you an example of this using real tasks so you can visualize it. Let's say that
we're planning to overlap recruiting the staff with recruiting the manager. So halfway
through getting the manager, we're going to start getting the staff. We need to know
exactly when we're going to start recruiting the staff, so either we divide the manager or
the staff down further as follows. We could divide the manager into selecting the
manager, interviews, et cetera, and then the notice period, we have to wait for the
manager to work their notice.
So what we would do is, we would say after we've selected the manager, we can then
get him or her to help interview the staff as well as waiting for their notice period. Or,
and I think I prefer this one in this example, we could divide the staff into, say, first and
second interviews, and then we say we can do the first interviews for the staff at the
same time as recruiting the manager, but the second interviewers will need to wait until
after we've got the manager. So by doing this, we can keep everything clear and simple.
Every task has to wait until the previous task is completely finished. None of this willy,
it's kind of overlapping, stuff. Now, finally in this section, I want to mention that some
people like to use special case dependencies. The good news is, that you are
unlikely to need to use these, but I think I need to tell you about them, just in case
you come across them in someone else’s project plan. There are four ways tasks can
be linked, and then you can have time lags between them. The four ways tasks can be
linked are as follows.
There's the normal one that we should always use, finish to start. After one task
finishes, the next one can start. Then there's start to start. After one task is started,
another can start. For example, once this camera is rolling, I can start talking to
you. And then there's finish to finish. Once the first thing is finished, maybe your car
journey, then the second thing can finish, maybe you wearing your sunglasses. And
finally, a very rarely-used connection, start to finish.
Where one thing can only finish after something else has started, like a shift handover
or something. But with all of these, it's simpler and better to use finish to start, otherwise
your plan will just get too confusing. Then there's the time lags that can
happen between tasks, sometimes known as lead and lag. If you're doing some
painting, you might need to wait for it to dry and then do the next coat. And this could be
shown as a two-hour lag between the two painting tasks.
But I think just show it as three tasks, paint, wait to dry for two hours, and then more
painting. Keep it as simple as you can, that's the essence. So personally, I would avoid
unusual dependencies. Just stick to finish to start, and I would avoid lead and lag. But
overlapping is important. So, thinking about your project, are there any tasks on the
critical path that could be overlapped a little in order to get the whole project finished
sooner, and if so, can you divide them down to make the overlap point as clear as
possible?

Understanding the difference between agile, scrum, and

waterfall
There's a bit of a battle going on in the world of project management, and it's between
the traditional method, using Gantt charts, and a new idea called agile, or sometimes
scrum. Agile is based on the idea that when you start a project, you don't entirely know
what's going to happen later on in the project. So therefore, it's not worth having a
detailed plan at the start. Agile people say plans will vary, so stay flexible and iterate as
you go along. Now my personal opinion is that this is true but also useless because you
now don't know how long the project will take or what it will cost.
I personally think it's better to start with a plan, a complete plan, and adjust it as you go
along. Now I will admit that agile may have its place when there's lots of creativity going
on. Perhaps you're creating software or it's an artistic project, something like that. And
in those sort of cases, the times can be very hard to predict. But even then, I think the
customer does need to know the cost and time scale. Though if you can get away
with selling them a job with these as unknowns, then good luck to you.
So I think you should use an estimate with a safety margin. I think that's much better
than having nothing. And to be fair, agile people do sometimes fix the time and then just
do as much of the features as they can in this time. Or they fix the money and do as
much as they can for the budget. So they won't overspend or go late, but still, the risk is
firmly with the customer who doesn't know exactly what they're going to get for their
investment of time and money. And that's not what I want if I'm the customer.
I know it's verging on unreasonable, but as a customer, I want to know what I'm going to
get, what it's going to cost, and when it will be done. The method which I am teaching
on this and my other courses is the APM or PMI method, known by agile people as
waterfall, and it copes with uncertainty by one of these four methods. Firstly, just using
the worst case. Secondly, using the most likely case.
Thirdly, adding contingency in to allow for certain amount of unknowns. And fourth,
dividing the project into phase one and phase two. So if you've got a lot of
uncertainty, phase one might be fact finding, research, exploratory drilling, et
cetera. And we tell the customer that we can't estimate phase two until phase one has
been completed. But after phase one, we do indeed give them a proper forecast for
phase two based on a proper detailed plan.
So have you sufficiently covered the uncertainty in your project by one of these four
methods? Have you put in some contingency, particularly in the critical path?

Estimating times and adding contingency

It's the critical path that determines the time scale that you're going to promise to your
customer. So once you've found it it's a good idea to double check your estimates on
that critical path. And then, add some contingency because something will go
wrong. There will be something you didn't think of. Maybe a task you've forgotten or
something changing in one of the tasks on the critical path. But how much contingency
should you put in? Well, I would recommend going for halfway between the average
and the worst case, which makes you 90% safe.
Now, don't worry about where this 90% comes from. There's some maths behind
here. But, if you go halfway between the average and the worst case you will be 90%
safe. And that means there is just a 10% chance that you'll end up letting the customer
down by running late. So, for example, if you have an 11 month project, and you feel
that it could easily go late by, say, a couple of months, maybe even three or four, then
you need to add on half of the worst case which is another two months.
And promise the customer 13 instead of 11. This would be 90% reliable. If you need
more than 90% reliability, say if there's a big horrible penalty clause, then you need to
add on three or even four months. Then, spread this contingency, these extra two
months through your critical path adding a little bit to each of the tasks. Why spread it
through? Well, partly to hide it, I've got to admit, because if you put it this one lump, the
customer, who might be your boss, will just take it back out again.
But also, because you genuinely don't know where the problems will crop up. They
really could be anywhere along the line. And when do you add this contingency
in? Well, you do it when you confirm the Network Diagram to the Gantt Chart. You add
a bit to each of the critical tasks on the Network Diagram, and then, once it's made into
the Gantt Chart, the safety margin is built in to your critical path. Now, just finally, three
things to look out for when you're looking at your Gantt Chart thinking about
risk: Number one, if you have lots of one-day or one-week tasks, it'll never happen.
In normal organizations, things never happen a day, a day, a day like that. You might
have something that happens in just one day but if you've got several in a row it's going
to take more than three days. Secondly, if the floating tasks are nearly critical, if they're
expected to take nearly as long as the critical path then that's another risk point you
need to keep an eye on. Thirdly, if your plan has lots of short tasks at the
end, something is likely to go wrong at some point in your project.
And then you'll be faced with rushing at the end, but if you already have lots of small
tasks at the end, it's not going to be possible to crush anything to get back on track
because they're already really short. So, you'll need to add a couple of weeks to a
project that looks like this. So, have a look at your Gantt Chart now and just check how
sure are you of your estimates of that critical path. Have you spread a bit of extra
contingency along it? Are there any floating parts that are nearly critical? And is there a
flurry of little tasks planned at the end that might catch you out?

Deciding the level of granularity

Next I want to mention the concept known as granularity, the degree to which the tasks
are broken down. I've already mentioned it briefly in the context of clarifying your
plan when you have tasks overlapping. The right level of detail is particularly
important to consider if one task is larger than the rest. Also, if you have too many
tasks, I would say more than 30 in your plan, then you should use a sub-Gantt. This is
just a Gantt chart on a separate Excel sheet which shows the detail of the tasks within
the one larger task.
So you can have a nice, clear overview plan, you know the estimates are
correct because you have detailed sub-Gantts behind them, and when you get to the
implementation of those tasks, you can monitor progress in detail by looking at the sub-
Gantt during each high-level task. It's also good to double check the
connections between tasks as you go. In theory, this is not needed because your
network diagram should in theory be correct. But in my experience, it's certainly worth
doing.
I'll give you an example of this. You can see in this example that as you draw your Gantt
chart, you might want to ponder things like would it be better to wait until I've bought the
site before I start my advertising. Maybe I missed a dependency there. And if I wait until
after I've got the manager, then maybe he or she could do the advertising. And maybe
the staff could buy their own furniture. There isn't an essential dependency between the
staff and the furniture or the manager and the advertising, but these are improvements
on the original plan which don't add any overall time to the project.
So why not do them? Finally, I would take an overall look at your network diagram and
just ask yourself does it look right. If it's very series with one task after another right
across the page, then you've probably been too cautious in your plan. It's going to be
very slow. And if it's very parallel with everything happening at the same time, then yes,
it's fast, but is it too risky? Are you sure there aren't any tasks that really should be done
one after the other, which in fact depend on each other? And if you have lots of one-
week tasks, as I've mentioned earlier, are you sure that things can happen that
quickly? In my experience, things don't often happen in just a week, especially, as I
mentioned, if you have a flurry of little tasks at the end.
Remember that in reality, you'll probably be running a bit late at the end, you'll be
needing to speed things up a bit. And if you've already got lots of small tasks, this is
going to be very difficult. I'm not saying your plan is necessarily wrong in any of these
cases, but if it has lots of small tasks at the end, it's just that it's likely to run a bit late, so
you might want to add a safety margin to the end of it. So just check your plan now and
make sure you don't have too many tasks, say, over 30, any single tasks that are much
longer than the others, or a flurry of small tasks at the end.
And does the plan look like a good mix of series and parallel?

Putting in and positioning the floating tasks

Now once you've got the critical path drawn in, you can put in all the floating tasks. This
bit is a bit more tricky, but the good news is, that if you do make a mistake, it'll be on a
floating task, and they don't matter nearly as much as the critical tasks. If a floating task
takes longer, it probably won't affect your overall project. They key to successfully
putting in the floating tasks is first, to put in the vertical lines. By this, I mean the two
constraints that every floating task has, when it can start, and when must it be finished.
These come from the arrows going into and out of the floating task. So, if tasks G, H,
and J have to be done before D, then put a vertical line down from the start of D, so that
we can see that fact clearly. Similarly on my diagram, K must be done before D, and L
and M come after C. Can you see that vertical line coming down from the end of C? And
they have to be done before the start of F, so there's another vertical line at the start of
F.
Finally, N can be anytime after C is complete and before the finish. Putting in these
vertical lines is really important. And I know from all the courses I've run that for some
reason, people are reluctant to put them in, so please, promise me, you'll put them
in. And then your Gantt chart will be nice and clear, you can see for every non-critical
task how much float it has. Now, in order to put the floating tasks in, as well as the
vertical lines, there are just two other concepts that you need to know.
And I've already sneaked one past you just now. If you understand these, you'll know
everything you need to know, because they form the building blocks for any Gantt chart,
however large. The first one, which we already saw just now, is the idea of sharing a
float. G, H, and J were sharing that first bit of float. And L and M were also sharing
float. If L takes longer, or starts later, M has less room to maneuver, I think that's fairly
common sense.
The other concept, slightly more tricky, is that of floaters depending on floaters. This is
when the start of a floating, or a non-critical task, depends on the finish of another
floating task. Have a look at this diagram. Advertising depends on the trade permit. And
yet the trade permit doesn't have a fixed, known position, it can be anywhere from
us having chosen a country to us buying the site. So we have a floater hanging off a
floater.
All it means, is that we don't know exactly how much float the advertising has. Not that it
matters in this case, because it has plenty. By the way, if you're wondering why we
don't just put the permit and the advertising in as a double, as two tasks sharing a
float, the answer is that the permit has that extra constraint, it has to be done before we
can buy the site. If the permit was allowed to be anywhere up til advertising, then they
would, indeed, just be two tasks sharing float.
Right, so we've put the floating tasks in with their verticals, and some of them might be
sharing float or hanging off other floaters. The next decision is whether to float
them earlier or later. I usually do two versions of my Gantt chart. Version one, where I
just put each task in the middle just to get it on there, and then version two where I
decide where the tasks are going to be floated to. Do I do them earlier or later? And this
is the finished version.
So, how do I decide if the tasks are going to be done earlier or later within their floatable
range? Well, doing them earlier, clearly means reduced risk. If they take longer than I
thought, then I'm still going to be okay. But doing them later also has advantages, in
fact, several. It's better for cash flow and sometimes even cost. For example, if I'm
employing a person, I'd want to put that off if I could. It's also better if there's a risk of
new information coming in.
And who has ever done a project where that doesn't happen? And finally, you
sometimes don't want stuff sitting around. For example, you wouldn't want to buy
furniture ages before you installed it. And you wouldn't want to get prices ages before
you bought something. But if you do decide to float something a bit later, always leave a
small buffer, so that if it takes longer, you're still okay. If you float it right up against the
right-hand constraint, then effectively, you've got yourself another critical task, another
task which, if it runs late, will make your whole project run late.
And then there's resource availability. Looking vertically down your ganshot, and I'll
come back to this later in more detail, if you have too many things happening at
once, you might want to float some of them either earlier or later. Now, a final thought,
neatness of your ganshot. If it's neater, then it will be easier for everyone to
understand. So, the first thing is to put the floating tasks in time order, where
possible. Compare these two examples I'm showing you now. I think you'll agree the top
one is much easier to get your head around.
But the other factor you might want to consider, and it's rather a weird feature of
ganshot, is that they don't have any rule about the vertical order of tasks. There's
actually no scale on the vertical access. Is that to avoid having the vertical
lines crossing, it's usually good to nest the floating tasks, working your way out from the
middle. This diagram makes it clear, I think. Of course, sometimes you can't avoid the
verticals crossing, and even if they cross when you could have avoided it, it's not the
end of the world.
But if you can make it neat, it's better. So, that's floating tasks covered in detail. And it's
time for you either to put yours in or to check yours. Have you put in the verticals? And,
do you want to float the floating tasks earlier or later? And, could you have made your
chart look neater and therefore clearer?
Assessing the software options
You're going to need to produce your Gantt Chart using software of some sort. And the
options for software are basically as follows. There's Excel, there's Microsoft
Project, there's Cloud-based free stuff, and there's tailored systems that do
everything. Now, just to deal with the free stuff first. Often it's too flaky, and usually you
can't share the outputs with people who don't have the same software, so I think they're
out. On the other end of the scale, you've got the tailored fancy systems that link into
your timesheets, holidays, pay rates, et cetera.
I think they're usually too expensive, and too time consuming. You'll spend your whole
time putting data in, and constantly having to change it as things change. And the
output will never be right. I've never seen one that works, and certainly not one that was
worth the money. Now, if your company builds power stations or something like that,
then you probably will be using a special package. But for normal, mere mortals, who
are just busy guys with a day job and several little projects to run a tailored package is
not going to be the answer.
So it's Excel versus Microsoft Project. Microsoft Project is great for quickly drawing a
Gantt Chart. It's very easy to draw them, it's easy to learn how to draw Gantt Charts
using Microsoft Project. And it's also great for what-ifs, if you want to change one
task it'll change all your plan for you. And it looks impressive if you want to impress a
boss or a client. But on the downside, it's expensive and you have to learn and
remember it.
When you come back to it a few months later to start another project. Also, it has a mind
of its own, so you often find yourself fighting with it. I know a lot of people who use it and
most of them don't really like it. Also, it encourages bad habits as I mentioned earlier, it
encourages jumping straight to the Gantt Chart without doing a network diagram
first. But for some people Microsoft Project is the right choice, if you're going to
be planning and running quite a few projects then I would certainly recommend that you
check it out, and decide if it's right for you.
There are some great Lynda courses on the details of how to run Microsoft Project. So
do have a look at those. By the way, while I'm talking about Microsoft Project, can I just
tell you about the commonest mistake that I've noticed when people are using Microsoft
Project? And this is not having a critical path at all. I know, it's incredible but that's what
happens. It's because often with Microsoft Project, people's plans tend to be
either completely in parallel, or completely in series.
Or, more commonly, they're a mixture of both. Because they have the tasks sorted by
department and then they have a whole lot of series plans, one for each department, all
in parallel with each other. And then, amazingly, there's no critical path shown at all. At
the very least, color the critical path in red. And there's a setting you can press to make
this happen. And ideally, call the critical path out up to the top so that we can make
sure that the critical path gets looked after.
Since after all, it is the most likely cause of project lateness. And remember if you're
using Microsoft Project to keep it simple, otherwise nobody will understand it and
nobody will use it. I've seen Microsoft Project plans with hundreds of tasks, nobody is
ever going to understand it, keep it as simple as you can. Anyway, for me personally
even though it's a lot more basic and in some ways clumsy I like using Excel. Because I
don't plan projects very often, and I don't want to have to learn and remember a whole
new bit of software.
Excel's better for sharing with other people. It's much better than Microsoft Project for
adding up costs and times, and I'll show you this in a minute. And it's really, really good
for resource planning for multiple projects. Everyone has already got it, and
everyone knows how to use it, and of course, Lynda has some great courses on Excel
too. So, the next action for you is to either just go ahead and make a Gantt Chart using
good old Excel, or if you have access to it have a look at Microsoft Project.
Maybe get someone to show you it, and see if you feel that it's for you. You might really
like it.

Using Excel for Gantt charts: My top 10 tips

My favorite software for producing Gantt charts is definitely Excel. And now, I want to
share with you, some of the little tricks that I've developed over the years, for creating
Gantt charts quickly and easily using Excel. You don't have to be great at Excel to make
a Gantt chart, it really is easy. Now, my first tip, and this one is a little bit fancy, I
suppose, is that I like to use conditional formatting to get it to color in the
squares. Normally, conditional formatting is used to show things like costs that are over
a million dollars, or where sickness is over 10%, but, in this case, I've told it that if the
contents of the cell are greater than zero, in other words, if there is anything in there at
all, to color it in, in red.
And then, I've told it to color the bottom half of the Gantt chart, where the floating tasks
are, in blue. If you don't know about conditional formatting, then ask someone to show
you. It's really useful for lots of other things, as well as just Gantt charts. My second tip
is to use weeks, rather than months or days. I think they're usually the best measure of
time and then highlight all the columns across the top, so that you can pull them all in
together to fit it all on to the screen. You want to be able to see the whole Gantt chart on
the screen.
My third tip is, select the first two dates, so you type in dates in the first two columns
and then drag the little corner across to copy them all in, so that you get all of the dates
of the weeks across the top of the screen. Again, ask someone to show you this if
you're not sure what I mean. Tip four is that I usually turn the dates vertical or slightly
diagonal, otherwise they can be too long for the columns. Tip five is that I like to add up
the hours, both vertically and horizontally, so that I can see what I am spending my time
on, that's the horizontal adding up and also when I'm spending it, that's the vertical
adding up and I put in a graph at the bottom to show the resource profile that goes
along the bottom of the Gantt chart.
Tip number six is that I've discovered that you can copy it all on to a second sheet and
use that for costs. So, cost instead of time. You keep it just the same, but you go
through and you type over the hours with the money that you plan to spend. So, you go
along all the cells of each task just putting how much money you plan to spend instead
of the hours, so that you can then see and add up that the cost that you're going to use
in each week and for each task. Tip seven is that if you've got a task or part of a
task which doesn't require any resource, it’s just waiting time, then if you put in
O instead of zero, it still colors it in and it still adds it up.
I'm really proud of that little tip, it took me ages to discover that. Tip number eight is that
you can insert holidays, like Christmas etc., when nothing happens by inserting extra
columns, do this after your plan is done, so that everything moves out another week or
two, just insert a blank column everything moves to the right. Because that's what's
actually going to happen in real life. Tip nine is that you can take the bottom line, the
total hours required, and you can copy it into your Gantt of Gantts.
Whether you're adding up hours or people or money, you can then get a total for all of
your projects. And finally, my tenth tip, when you come to the coloring in, to show your
progress, you'll find that because of the conditional formatting, it won't color in the tasks
that you've completed. So, the answer is to colour in a cell outside of your formatted
area and then use the formatting paintbrush to wipe over anything that's been
completed.
So, to conclude this section on Excel, I'd like you now to make a note of any of the
above that you didn't already know and try them on your next Excel Gantt chart.

Using templates
Sometimes people ask me, "Hey Chris, please can you "send me and Excel template
for a Gantt chart?" And I think, "Well, not really." Because what would it have on it? The
tasks down the side have to be theirs and the dates across the top have to be theirs. So
what can I send them? I think next time I get this request I might just send them a blank
page, a completely empty Excel workbook. But, actually, to be fair, it can be worth
keeping a master template for future similar projects.
Once you've done a project, similar ones in the future can start to become a process as
you use the same plan next time, with just the dates changed. Or, you could use the
most complicated one as your template and then, for each repeat project, you can
delete the bits you don't need. But the main thing is, keep it simple. Don't have lots of
complicated templates for people with automatic macros and stuff because, then most
people won't understand it, they won't use it.
And you'll end up with no project plans at all. So I guess the thing to think about here is,
would it be worth setting up a template of some sort for your repeating general types of
project?
Communicating the plan and getting it signed off
The first reason why Gantt charts are great is for communication. This begins right at
the start of your project. If you were asked to do a very easy project, then you can just
find out exactly what they want, say yes, go away, plan it, and do it. If your project is at
all difficult, which pretty much every project is, then you'll be wanting to find out exactly
what they want and then say, before I promise anything, I just need to do a bit of
planning. Which I think you'll agree, is a reasonable thing to want to do.
You then go away and do the planning, including producing your Gantt chart, which
enables you then to come back and say either good news, I can do your project, or less
good news, I can do your project, but I'll need a bit longer than you would ideally give
me, or more money than you want to spend, or reduce the specification a little to get it
done in the time. So, the Gannt chart not only allows you to check that you can do what
you're promising, but also, it gives you an arguing tool that you can use with your boss
or your customer.
It's so simple and intuitive, that anyone can understand it. Everyone at the kickoff
meeting can see what their part is and they can all commit to doing their part. After the
meeting, you email everyone and you say, just to confirm that this is the plan that you're
all signed up to, and then they can't let you down later in the project. That email is the
best one you'll ever send. So, just to make sure that you're really clear on this
part, there are two kickoff meetings. One for a discussion on what we're going to
have and then after you've done your planning and got your Gantt chart, one for
everyone to sign off the plan, which they've all agreed to.
The Gantt chart is so much better than a list of tasks with start and finish dates. Yes,
you could boil the Gantt chart back down to a list of tasks, and you do now know the
start and finish date of each task, but why would you do that? Why would you lose all
the visionless? A list of tasks doesn't allow you to see the size of the tasks, which ones
are critical, what happens if one task goes late? What effect does it have on the
others? What are the options for catching the time back up? Are there going to be any
resource problems, where several tasks are happening at the same time, etc.
The other thing that's bad about a list of tasks... Sorry, but this is a bit of a pet-hate of
mine. When people say they have a project plan and then they show me a list of tasks
with dates on, I always ask them where they got the dates from, and they never say
they got the dates from a Gantt chart. They always say that they made them up. So,
those start and finish dates are probably wrong. A list is not a project plan. Only a Gantt
chart is. I feel better now.
So, the questions for you are how good are you at kickoff meetings? Do you have them
at all? Would it be better if you had two stages instead of just the one meeting? Please
tell me that you don't have just a list of tasks with dates on them.
Communicating with customers
The other important communication area is with customers. A Gantt chart will allow you
to quickly and easily show customers why it takes so long to do their project. And it will
also justify the price because it shows brilliantly how much work there is. Often projects
are much more complicated than they first sound, and customers don't always realize
the work involved in giving them what they want. It also shows them what they need to
do for their part and when and the effect on the whole thing if they're late.
For example, if you're making a website and the client needs to supply the written
content, they need to commit to delivering it on time. It's also a great sales aid. You look
systematic, organized, experienced. They can trust you so much more than the next
guy who just says, “It’ll take 10 weeks," without any proof. Even if his time's shorter than
yours, how could we know he's right? And you can offer them options. We could do the
project faster, but it'll be more expensive.
Or we can do it faster, but it will involve some risk. Or we can do it cheaper, but it'll have
to be lower quality. And the brilliant thing is that Gantt charts work if the customer
understands them, and also if they don't. In a way, Gantt charts look even more
impressive if the customer doesn't understand them, although they are pretty intuitive to
understand, even if the customer's had no training at all. So have you shared your
Gannt chart with your customer? Would it be helpful if you did?

Planning resources for one project or for multiple

projects
The next use for Gantt charts, and it's another thing that there's no other way to do, is to
work out what you're going to need in terms of resources. This can be for just your one
project or maybe for a number of projects that you're planning to do. Taking this one
level at a time, if you're just doing one project, you can use your Excel Gantt chart to
add up the columns vertically and just check that the totals don't exceed the number of
hours or people that you have available. You can see in this example here, I've added
up the columns and I've got a rather busy patch around week 24 and I can ask myself
whether I can cope with that.
What if I can't? The obvious first option is to slide the floating tasks forward or
back which, you can see on my diagram, makes a huge difference. The resource plan
also known as a loading plan is much better now, much more evenly distributed. If
sliding the floating tasks around doesn’t make enough difference, then the only other
options are to either get more resources or, and this is a bit of a crime, a bit of a last
resort, you could break the critical path and just take longer over the whole project.
Your units of measure for this resource plan could be hours per week, or person days
per week or month, or the number of people, perhaps the full time equivalence, per
week or month. But what about when you've got more than one project? I want to give
you an example of this. A friend of mine is IT director of a large company. He has a
team of about 50 people and about 30 projects on the go at any one time. Every month,
he goes to the monthly management meeting, it's him and all the other directors.
And they ask him how certain projects are getting on, "How's the barcode reading
project getting on?" And he says, "Oh, it's going really well, yes, "it's going to be ready
by the 17th of July." He actually hasn't a clue, he just makes it up, it's just a complete
guess. When I discovered this, I just was scandalized, I couldn't believe he's just
making dates up. And I said to him, "You're going to get caught," and he said, "No, and
that'll be alright," because he said, "What I do after the meeting "is I go back to all my
people and I say right, "All of you guys, "can you all get on to the barcode project
straight away?" So they all work on that, so of course when July comes, they've done it.
But he said, "Occasionally, when July comes, "we haven't done it "but they don't notice
because they've gone on "to the next flavor of the month by then anyway "so they don't
check." But he said, "Very occasionally, "they do check and I haven't done it. "And they
go, "Ooh, what happened with this barcode reading, "why isn't it ready?" And then he
just baffles them with science, he just says, "Oh, yes we had terrible
problems "reconfiguring the server protocol stack architecture, "but I've got my best
team on it "and it'll be ready by the 11th of August." And that's how he gets out of
trouble.
I was just thinking, this is mad because he's promising everything to these people and
failing quite often, and he's taking all the strain on himself, all that risk of being
caught. Not only that, but as a group of people, they're not able to make proper
decisions. Because ideally, he would be able to say to them, "I can't do all the projects,
which one do you want?" And they could then have a proper prioritization
discussion about which projects they really want to have. At the moment they just ask
for everything.
He promises everything and then doesn't deliver it. You're probably laughing about
this but actually I wonder whether your company is similar because I think most
organizations don't have a big master plan like this, they don't actually have a Gantt of
Gantts. What he needed was a Gantt of Gantts like this. This would've allowed him to
say things like "You can't have project E until September "unless you want me to move
it forward, "but then you can't have project D until later." At least, he would then have
real dates for every project, he wouldn't just be saying yes to everything and hoping that
they don't notice that he hasn't done it all.
Let's just have a quick look at this Gantt of Gantts. Tell me about project A. Yeap, that's
right, it’s completed as in deed it should be. Now, what about project B? Yeap, you can
clearly see, it's running a bit late. It should be 90% complete by now and it's only about
70%. What about project C? You can clearly see that for some reason it's ahead of
schedule. You don't often see that in real life but maybe the people have given up on
B and started on C, I don't know.
But anyway, we could ask the question about what's going on. Now, what about project
D? Yeap, that's right, it hasn't been started when it should've been, and again we can
find out why. Now, why do you think I've put on project E, F and G? Of course, it's
because I'm looking at all of them and wondering if I can do them all at the same
time. And if I can't, I can have that conversation with my boss or maybe the three
different people who want those projects and ask them which one I should do first or
which one needs to be, is going to have to be, pushed back until later.
It's not up to me to decide, I'll do whatever they want, but they have to decide on their
priorities between them and I can just sit back and let them fight it out. That's so much
better than promising everything, basically over promising, and then running the risk of
getting into trouble later when someone gets let down. It shows me the past and the
future. The past, “Have I done what I should've done?" And the future, "Can I do what I
want to do?" The reality of your Gantt of Gantts is that each of these shapes will
probably just be a line on a spreadsheet, a line of numbers which you can then add up.
So, how would you actually produce it? There are two ways, the ideal way and the
actual way that you would probably do it. The ideal way is to have a Gantt chart for
every project and then take the total from the bottom of each one, copy them all unto
your Gantt of Gantts summary. The actual way that you would probably do it is to guess
it. (laughs) This is not as bad as it sounds. You would say, "I reckon project A is about
one person for four weeks "and I reckon project B is about "two people for six weeks," et
cetera.
So the Gantt of Gantts is going to be fairly rough but still massively better than having
nothing at all. To sum up where we are so far on resource planning, there are three
levels of resource planning, the Network Diagram made with Post-it notes which
assumes infinite capacity, then the basic Gantt chart which looks at capacity for just that
one project in isolation, and then the Gantt of Gantts which looks at the big picture of
the team or department or the company as a whole.
But what if you have specialist resources, maybe computer programmers or
engineers, or lawyers or something that can do one project but not another. This is a
difficult problem because it's a cube. You've got a cube of Projects, Time and Resource
type. A normal spreadsheet can't easily show it but there are two principles that you can
use to help solve this problem of which order to do your projects. First, you could take
one slice of the cube once you know what your bottleneck resource is and just look at
time and projects for that one resource.
This will look like the Gantt of Gantts that I showed earlier for that resource. If you don't
know what the bottleneck is, and by the way it is often IT, you could do a Gantt of
Gantts for just your part of the company, At least your area will be properly planned
then. But it's best to find the bottleneck by adding up all of the work for the year. Then
you can see who can't cope with the expected workload, and that's your bottleneck. If
you have several areas that can't cope with the work they have to do for the year, then
the bottleneck is whoever is struggling most because if you spread it out for them, then
the others will all be okay too.
So take the slice for that and just do a resource plan for them and work out which
projects you’re going to have to push out into the future, keep shoving projects out into
the next year until the plan looks doable. The other principle is to identify the work that
can't be moved. So you add up the can't be moved jobs to get a required resource
profile, this is the unavoidably required resources. Then you can take this away from the
available total resource to see how much or how little resource you have left for all the
rest of the work.
Then you can work out how you will fit the rest in and they might have to be spread way
into the future. To sum up this slightly hairy session, there are four uses of the Gantt of
Gantts. There’s saying "no" to new work; there's discussion of priorities, you could sit
back and let your customers decide which is what they should be doing; there's
rejigging when work comes in, it allows you to plan rather than just say yes, inevitably
fail and then hope to hide the fact that you failed; and finally, monitoring progress, in
one view, you can see whether all the projects are progressing okay or not.
If you are the big boss of everything, you could check on the progress of all projects in
just one minute a month. So, where are you at with all of this? Have you got any kind of
Gantt of Gantts? Would it be beneficial to have one? Are you going to do one for just
your area or for the bottleneck resource, or a big overview plan for the whole company?

Monitoring progress of one project or multiple projects

Probably the easiest and yet most underrated use for a Gantt Chart is to monitor the
progress of your project. People often produce the Gantt Chart in order to get the okay
for the project. And then they never use it again. What a waste, all that effort to make
it and then they don't use it to keep track of how the project is doing. Keeping track is
done by colouring in what you've done so far, and comparing your progress with the
now, or today, line. The now line used to be a piece of string, but nowadays it's going to
be on your computer.
So how often should you colour in what you've done? Well probably montly, but it could
be weekly, if your project is a short, fast moving one. The great thing about the coloured
in Gantt Chart is that it brings the pain forward, otherwise you don't know you've got a
problem until the finish line is in sight, and you can then see that you aren't going to
make it. By which time, it's too late to do anything about it. But if you know ages before
that you're maybe a week behind, catching back up then only requires a very small
increase in speed for the rest of the project.
Now with colouring in you need to know that there are two ways to do it. There's
proportional colouring, where if you've done half a task you colour in half of it, and
then there's colour when complete, where you don't colour in any of it until the whole
task is done. Which one do you prefer? Proportional colouring tells you more, but is
prone to self-delusion. Colour when complete is always correct, but you don't know how
much had been done until suddenly it's coloured in at the end.
So, which one to pick? Well, granularity solves the problem. If you divide a long task
into bits, you can then use colour when complete and still know exactly what's going
on. Colour when complete, plus granularity, that's what I prefer. And remember that you
can always have your sub-Gantt for longer tasks, stored on a separate page so that you
can do your proportional colouring on your high-level plan and it will be pretty much
accurate.
So, if I only had one minute to check on your project, if I only had time to ask one
question, my question would be please can I see your coloured in Gantt Chart. And if
you say, uh, what's a Gantt Chart? Then I would worry, because if I ask you about how
the project's going, you’re just going to tell me stories. Oh yes, we've got the
foundations built. Oh yes, we found a great new supplier. And I'm going to be thinking,
well, that's all very jolly, but should they have done more than that by now, I don't know.
Only a coloured in Gantt Chart tells me what I want to know. And if you've got several
projects on the go at once, you can't possibly hope to hold them all in your head. A
Gantt Chart for each one is easily the best way to keep an eye on the progress of all of
them. And of course, as we've seen earlier, with a Gantt of Gantts, where you have all
of them on one page it allows you to monitor the progress of a whole department in one
minute a month. So, for your projects, do you have them all coloured in as you
progress? So you can easily check the progress of each one at a glance? Do you think
it would be a good idea to have this?

Assessing risk
The Gantt chart is also helpful when you're thinking about risk. What might possibly go
wrong with the project that you're planning? For assessing the risk of lateness, you
really only need to check the tasks on the critical path. They are by far the most likely
cause of lateness for your project. Although, if there are any noncritical tasks that are
nearly critical, they have a very small amount of float, then you might want to keep an
eye on them as well. For risk of cost overspend, you need to think about the cost risks
of all the tasks.
Any task, critical or not, that ends up costing more than you expected will take you over
budget. You could have extra columns by the side of the Gantt chart for risks, although
normally they would be on a separate page because you might have more than one
risk for a particular task. So you would list how likely and serious the potential problems
are and then add your mitigation plans for making these potential problems less likely
and less serious.
Sometimes there's an iteration required. You need to go back and add more tasks in
order to prevent risks. For example, you might've realized you need to insert buy and
install fire extinguishers. So your Gantt chart might have to be modified after you
thought you'd finished it. But it's not usually difficult to go back and add in a couple of
extra tasks. So to sum up this little section on risk, I want you to ask yourself, have you
looked at the risks for your project, both in terms of time and money? Do you have
enough mitigation plans in place?
Planning to speed up your project
Now we come to the subject of speeding up your project, if it's looking like it's going to
deliver late. If the plan is looking to slow before you start then you need to speed up
some part of it. And this will have to be some of the tasks on the critical path. And
maybe also some of the ones on the nearly critical path. The ones where the floating
tasks have very little float. Because otherwise, when you speed up the critical path by
shortening some of the tasks, these other ones will then become the new longest path.
Your options for speeding up these tasks are as follows. Firstly, putting the money
up. Which might mean throwing more people at it, or putting the quality down. Not really
a good choice but it might be unavoidable. Thirdly, overlapping some of the tasks, if
that's possible. These are known as crashing the project. Remember to focus on the
biggest task first because that's where the biggest gains can be found. And always look
out for the nearly critical paths in parallel.
If you need to speed things up during your project, then the same options apply for the
second half. You've got crashing which was money up, or quality down, or
overlapping. You also have the option to let the project slip, to just run a bit later. And
this might be a better option than spending more or reducing the quality. There is one
more options as well. Do nothing and hope. I don't recommend this one, although often
project managers are tempted by it, since they feel that they've been so unlucky in the
first half, they are owed some luck.
But I think we know that if the first half was bad the second half will probably be just the
same. Unless you do something different. So with any of these changes you'll have to
redo the Gantt chart, but it won't take too long to do. But an important rule is that you
can only reschedule once, and that should be at about half time. Halfway through the
project, take a view and decide whether you think you're going to make it on time and
on budget, or not. And if not, come clean and ask for more time or more money.
Bosses and customers don't like horrible surprises right near the end of their
projects. And remember that you need to ask for more than the same again. For
example, if you're halfway through your project and you're meant to be on fifty out of a
hundred and you're on fifty-five...And this could be money or time, but let's say it's how
much you've spent. You shouldn't forecast a hundred and five at the end. If things went
wrong in the first half, then the second half will surely not be perfect.
And even forecasting a hundred and ten is risky, since the second half is probably going
to be about fifty-five, maybe fifty-four, maybe fifty-six, and forecasting a hundred and ten
and then asking for an extra one or two is going to look really bad. Better to take the
extra stick now. Forecast a hundred and twelve. It's the same amount of stick for a
hundred and twelve, as it is for a hundred and ten, by the way. And then you can be a
hero when you bring it in at a hundred and ten later.
How is your project getting on? Which of the catching up options are you going to
choose? And do you need to confess any lateness or overspend to your boss or
customer? And if you do, how much more are you going to ask for?
Predicting spend
The final use for Gantt charts that I want to tell you about is predicting spend. Before
you start your project, the Gantt chart will allow you to easily generate a spend
curve. This is what you will spend when and it's based on what you expect to be doing
when. If you put the costs along each bar of the Gantt chart, then you can add it to allot
vertically to get your expected spend in each week or month. The Gantt chart is the only
way to generate your predicted spend curve because it's the only way to know what
you'll be doing when.
Then as you go along, your first task is to work out whether you are overspending or
not. This may not be as obvious as you think because time and money can get mixed
up in the accounting for cost. For example, if you're underspent, comparing what you've
spent so far with what you expected to have spent on the project so far by this
date, then it probably means you're behind schedule. You haven't spent the
money because you haven't done the work.
And if you're overspent, it probably means you're overspent. And by the way, being
behind schedule probably means you'll end up overspent. Because you're behind for a
reason, there have been problems of some sort, so you're not only late, but heading
towards being overspent at the end. So, overspent means overspent and underspent
means late, which means overspent. You always lose. But in a way, this is
obvious because any deviation from the plan is going to mean that you spend more
than the plan because hopefully, the plan was to do the project the best and most
efficient way.
So, to unpick progress and spend, you need to check your colored-in Gantt
chart. Looking at just spend tells you nothing. There is no way to tell the
difference between underspent and late. But as soon as you look at the Gantt chart, the
difference is obvious. I've got a great example of this. One of my customers was
building a massive road. It was going to cost 20 million pounds spread over five
years. And I went to see him to ask how he was getting on.
And he said, "Well, one year has gone "and we spent four million pounds, "so
everything's fine." What was I thinking at that point? Well, my first thought is it depends
how much he's done. What if he's only done 10% of the road and he spent four million
pounds? He's heading for 40 million, not 20 million. He could be in huge trouble. There's
also the question of nonlinear spend because maybe he has done what he should have
done for the first year, but maybe the first year was only digging foundations and that
was only meant to cost a couple of million and he spent four.
So, he doesn't really know what it should have cost for the first year and he doesn't
know what he's done. Now, how could he get a closer view of those things? Well, a
Gantt chart would tell him how much is being done and a Gantt chart would tell
him what that first year should cost. So, there are two reasons he needs a Gantt
chart. So, I said to him, "Okay, well that sounds good, "but what does the Gantt chart
say?" And guess what he said. He said, "Hmm, good point. "I don't think we got one of
those." And I just thought, "I can't believe it.
"You got this 20-million-pound project "and no Gantt chart." So I said to him, "Okay. "So,
how do you monitor the progress of this project? "How do you control it?" And he said,
"Oh, I have a monthly meeting "with the contractors." And I said to him, "Okay. "So,
what happens at that meeting? "Do they have a Gantt chart?" And he said, "Well,
no." He said, "If they have, I haven't seen it." He said, "At the monthly meeting with the
contractors, "they tell me stories. “They tell me, 'Oh, we've had terribleness "'with the
weather. It's been so cold "'and the concrete hasn't been setting "'and we're using a
special mixture.'" So, they just tell him stories about what's going on and he basically
doesn't know.
And I just couldn't believe that. So I said to him, "Okay. Well, I'm sure it's all fine." And I
just got out of there. But funny now, I heard from him a few weeks later and he said, "I
don't suppose you could come "and teach us about Gantt charts, could you?" So, I think
it's amazing that there are people out there, who they listen to stories, but they don't
have a colored-in Gantt chart and it means that they don't really know what's going on
with the money. So, once you've worked out what's happening at the moment in your
project, the next question is to work out what's going to happen in the future.
Your objective is to estimate what's often known as the FCC. This is the Forecast Cost
at Completion. And you're going to estimate this from a combination of the progress in
the spend. The main question is whether your problems are going to continue at the
same rate in the second half of your project or whether they are all in the past now. It's
what we always hope, isn't it? We always hope they're in the past, but are they? And so,
for the second half of the project, are you going to get back onto plan? Let's do an
example.
Have a look at this simple project. It's just four tasks: A, B, C, and D, done one after the
other. You can see that the total cost is 70 plus 30 plus 100, plus 160, which comes to
360. And the total expected time is five plus six, plus three, plus eight, which is 22
weeks. Okay, so we're going to spend 360 over 22 weeks. Now, suppose that 16 weeks
have been used up and we've done A and B and we've spent 150, how are we
doing? Well, I think you'll agree, not very well.
A and B should have only taken 11 weeks, not 16, and they should have only cost
100, not the 150 that we have spent. So we're doing badly on both time and money. But
the accountants have a totally different view. They're expecting us to have done A, B,
C and a quarter of D by now because 16 weeks have passed and A, B, and C were
meant to take 14 weeks and then that's two more weeks for us to have done a quarter
of D.
So they will have expected us to have spent 70 for A, 30 for B, 100 for C, and a quarter
of D, which is another 40, so that's 240 by now. They expect us to have spent 240, not
the 150 that we have spent. They think we're underspent because they don't know how
little work we've actually done. So they're happy because they can't see a Gantt
chart, but we know they shouldn't be.
So now, I want you to pause this video and see if you can work out the following. What
do you think the project will end up costing? And when do you forecast it will be
finished? Both as an optimist and a pessimist. This optimist/pessimist question sounds
like it's going to make the question harder, but actually, it makes it easier, because it
helps you to keep your thinking clear. So, please do pause the video and have a go at
this question and then when you restart it, I'll tell you how to work out the answer.
You're back. I wonder what answers you came up with for the cost and the time. Well,
here's the answer explained. Let's do the money first. Now the optimist is going to
say, "A and B should have cost 100, "but we've spent 150 on them. "We're over by
50, "but assuming we get back on to plan, "we'll spend another 260 on C and D, "ending
up with a total cost of 410."That's the optimist back onto plan.
The pessimist will say, "We've been spending a durative 1.5 times the plan." By the
way, this is sometimes known as the cost performance index or CPI and it is 1.5. So,
1.5 times 360 means that overall, we're going to spend 540. So, that's the pessimist
view carrying on as badly as we have been in the first half. Now let's look at the
time. It's the same calculation, really.
The optimist says, "A and B should have taken 11, "but we've taken 16. "We're late by
five. "But assuming we get back onto plan, "we'll take another 11 weeks on C and
D, "ending up with a total of 27." Did you get that? The pessimist, again, they're going to
say, "Well the first half took 16 instead of 11, "so the second half will probably also take
16 "instead of 11," which gives a total of 32, instead of 22 weeks.
By the way, a more correct way to describe this calculation is to say that we've been
progressing at a rate of 11 over 16 compared to the plan. So, the whole job should have
taken 22, but at this slower rate, it's going to take 22 times 16 over 11, which gives us
32 weeks. But who is right? The optimist or the pessimist? Well, it's probably going to
be somewhere in between, but if you want to know which end to pick, only knowledge of
what went wrong with A and B will tell you which of the two views to take for the rest of
the project.
Only you, the project manager, know whether those problems are likely to repeat
again in the second half or not. So, for your project, do you know how much you've
spent so far and have you compared it to what you should have spent? And have you
separated out the spend from the progress by comparing the money with the Gantt
chart? And finally, what is your forecast completion date and your forecast cost at
completion?
Avoiding the common mistakes
So finally, I want to give you a list of my top five mistakes to look out for. And number
one is jumping straight to the Gantt Chart. Always make a network diagram first, so that
you can be sure that you've got the correct critical path. Mistake number two is
getting the wrong level of granularity. Too little makes your plan too high-level and
impossible to estimate. And too much makes your plan too complicated, with too many
tasks. But once you know about the concept of granularity and the fact that you can
have a sub-Gantt for any larger tasks, you should be able to get this right.
The third mistake to look out for is forgetting contingency. Remember to always put
some in, spread along the critical path. The fourth mistake is neglecting the Gantt
chart once you've started. It's easy to keep it colored in as you go, and it will certainly
save you a lot of pain towards the finish date. And the final mistake to avoid is changing
your plan more than once. Customers worry if you keep changing your plan. You get
one shot, and you should do this about halfway through, and ask for plenty, so that you
don't have to come back later and ask for more.
So now you know what to look out for. And if you avoid these, you'll be in good shape.

Wrap-up
Thank you for watching my Gantt chart course. If you want to know more about project
management, then the next step is probably to have a look at my other Lynda courses
on project management. There's one on the whole process of planning projects called
Project Management Simplified. And there's one on how to avoid common project
problems. And then, of course, the other thing for you to do is to have a go at producing
a Gantt chart for your current project. You'll be amazed at how easy they are and how
useful they are. And please do keep in touch with me.
Connect with me on LinkedIn. And if you want to subscribe to my free e-mail tips, I'd be
delighted, just go to free-management-tips.co.uk and put in your e-mail address, and
you'll get useful thoughts from me, free, forever, and they never repeat. I do hope to see
you again, bye for now.