Could Your Business Benefit from Using Gantt Charts?

​If you run a business, you will know that there are numerous types of software and platforms available to help in many different areas. From invoices to time management software, there are many tools to assist you in running your business. Gantt charts are a useful organizational tool that your business may benefit from, and here is some basic information about them, what they do, and how you can implement them.

What are they?

A Gantt chart is a bar chart commonly used by project managers to help schedule and track projects over a certain period of time. You can use a Gantt Chart platform to help you create one and customize it as you need to. Organization is incredibly important when running a business, and it can help to have a visual representation of your different tasks and projects so that you and your team and stay up to date on your progress. Tasks can be quickly updated or altered, easily assigned to different team members, color-coded, and calendars incorporated, as well as a range of other useful features. 

What are they used for?

Gantt charts are used to visually represent and track the progress of a project from start to finish. Although charts will look different depending on their content, they always consist of an X and Y axis, and components are plotted onto this. Components can include:

• Tasks- these are the activities that need to be completed, and you can go into as much detail as you like, creating groups and subgroups outlining each individual task.
• Time- the expected duration of each task.
• Status- how far through to completion a task is.
• Owner- who the task has been assigned to, whether that is a single person or a group.
• Milestones- overarching tasks without a duration that mark the completion of a project phase.
• Dependencies- how each task connects to the other tasks. 

Can you benefit from them?

Due to the flexible and customizable nature of Gantt charts, they are useful in many different businesses. If you are a project manager and want more help planning your workflow, determining the critical path of a project, or interpreting and setting deadlines, then Gantt charts could be the perfect solution for you. They have benefits for your business and for your employees, as many people appreciate having a visual aid to help them understand tasks and projects, and Gantt charts help keep everybody in the loop.

Gantt charts can also help you as a manager assign and delegate roles and tasks, keep track of your employees and their progress and quickly update the chart if necessary. It can act as a roadmap for your project, outlining the outcomes and steps required in order to achieve them. In general, Gantt charts have been around in one form or another since the late 1800s, showing them to be an adaptable and useful tool in business management, planning, and organization.