Gantt Charts
The discussion with someone in office is this today. A Gantt Chart has literally no use except for adding it into presentations - this is what I said him. In a sense, it’s true. What exactly do you infer from a Gantt Chart? For instance, look at the chart below.
It gives me a bird’s eye view of the current status of the features - grey for completed, white for in progress, blue for yet to start and red for critical features. It is one of the easiest ways you can visualize the current status of a project and if you are on track or not. Notice the big, red market. It’s the current daymarker.
But, where are the problems? As a general rule, the longer the project duration, the more messier the chart is - the chart first changes to weekly intervals and you don’t have a clue whether it’s Monday or Wednesday when the work is getting completed(it’s just a rough estimation for you) and more importantly, it’s a hassle to update.
Now, I use Mermaid on VS Code to view build a quick and dirty Gantt to see if the plan is making sense and then I ask others to use that as a base to build more eye catching gantt charts. Why Mermaid? Because I type the chart, not design it.
Below is the code for the above chart. Notice, all I do here is give the feature name, status, start and end dates(either relative or absolute). And if needed, a critical flag.
Now, the problem is this. If you make it to day level, it will be too cluttered to extract any sense out of it. On the other hand, if you keep the chart just as it is, date level inference is not that easy.
As I noted above, Gantt Chart is a very good, high level visual representation of the health of a project and the timelines but don’t use it as a standard report unless you have a steady stream of data which updates the status and completion percentage automatically. It’s a good add-on but not something on which you can rely upon.
There are a few guidelines, though
Creating a gantt chart shouldn’t waste much time. If you can have an excel macro or an integrated project management suite(for example, JIRA Roadmaps), it’s even more better.
It needs to have a way to differentiate critical and non-critical features, checkpoints, colour coding based on status and today marker.
Always try to find a solution where the input you give is a table and output for you is a gantt chart.