Toolkit: Gantt chart

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The main purpose of the Gantt chart is to show the timeline of the project.

Just a reminder to keep a record of all the tools in the table below. As long as you can fill in all the cells of the table, you will be able to write a successful IA.

Gantt chart is a project management tool for visualising the timeline of project activities/tasks. Its purpose is to visualise the project timeline. Gantt chart is a relatively simple tool with only two main elements:

1. Activity (task) — one of the assignments in the project, indicated by horizontal bars.

2. Duration — how long the task takes (hours, days, weeks, months, etc.), indicated by the bar length.

There are 5 simple steps in preparing a Gantt chart. To illustrate all the steps, we’ll refer to a Bobo Pizza restaurant and its manager who finished the restaurant renovation but did not use any business tools for planning the renovation project. The manager just shut down the restaurant for one month and did all the renovation based on his feelings, without any system. We’ll see if the manager could have saved some time if he used a Gantt chart.

First of all, it is necessary to identify all project activities/tasks.

After that, we put all the tasks in order. In this case, we just label them from A to G.

Then, we identify dependencies and durations. Let’s say we talked to the Bobo Pizza restaurant manager and he said that installing new equipment can only start after the old one is removed. Besides, new furniture in the dining area can only be assembled after the walls are painted and old furniture is removed. The manager and staff also said how long each of the tasks took.

Now we have everything we need to construct the Gantt chart for the Bobo Pizza renovation. Based on the previous step...