What is a Gantt chart?

Gantt chart is a project management tool widely used for simplifying particularly complex projects. It is ideally used for planning and scheduling projects. This very handy tool gives managers insight into the team workloads, availability of the members of the team and tasks at hand.

In Gantt chart, projects are visualized horizontally on a time axis showing the dates from the start until the end of the project. The tasks and their dependencies are visualized, where every member of the team can clearly see in what stage the project is, what tasks are done, which ones to follow and which smaller tasks are needed, in order to finish a stage of the project. This is useful to keep track of the project, visually display the timelines and deadlines of each task, relationship, and dependencies between these various activities as well as project phases

How to set up a Gantt chart

First of all, it is needed to think through all the tasks involved in your project and divide these into smaller manageable chunks.

Identify the relationships between the tasks and decide on the sequence of these, as well as the start, duration, and end dates. It is important to keep the tasks in sequential order, to evade a possible confusion as well as dependencies between various tasks.

Afterwards it is important to decide which members of the team are going to be responsible for specific tasks and delegate them to the team.

Determine and allocate your resources. Prepare contingency plans and be prepared for various problems that you may encounter, after all it is always better to be prepared and not need it, then be in need but not prepared.