So it’s time to for a new project. Something that involves multiple people, days of work, and lots Starbucks runs to keep you going.
You might be thinking “How am I going to organize this project and show my team how much team need to allocate for specific tasks?” Well search no more for an answer because we’ve got you covered: introducing the Gantt Chart.
What is a Gantt chart you ask? Well, basically it’s a visual way to track the amount of time needed to complete different tasks for a large project.
WARNING: Creating a Gantt Chart is rather time consuming and can be frustrating if you are just getting the hang of it. If you have a big project that spans multiple days, weeks, or even months, then this will defiantly be a big help, but if it’s a small project then making a simple Priority List in Excel might be more beneficial.
Alright for those of you who have chosen to embark on this Gantt Chart journey, open Excel, create a new spreadsheet, and get ready to Gantt!
Part 1: Set Up Your Assignments
Create a list in Excel of all the different tasks that need to be accomplished in this project. In the next three rows include all the tasks’ start dates, amount of days it should take to finish each task, and their all important due dates.
To keep it as organized as possible and easy to understand, creating a priority excel spread sheet before hand could help you, and your team, out in the long run. But remember to be careful and try to include as much of your project information as possible since going back and adding more tasks, due dates, ect. could be a big hassle.
Part 2: Bring In the Bars
Next it’s time to take your list and turn it into a set of bars. You can do this by going to the chart icon in your excel spread sheet and pick the set of bars that looks like this:
Now a blank chart should appear on your spreadsheet. See it? Great. let’s keep going!
Part 3: Set Up Your Axises
Now that you are half way and have your bars picked you can start inserting your task information.
Don’t panic! You might experience a brief moment of Dejavu because we are taking a trip back to 9th grade math class and graphs. Here we need to set up an X-Axis (our tasks column) and a Y-Axis (our days to completion possibly “April 1” or “4/3”).
This can be done by right clicking on your blank bar chart (don’t worry if you don’t actually see any bars, its supposed to be blank) or simply selecting “Select Data” on the right side of your screen. Then you can click on the the Start Dates and Due Dates along with tasks to create your specific Gantt Chart.
Part 4: Complete The Gantt Chart
After setting up your X and Y axis, you can now proceed to customizing your Gantt chart. Using different colors to identify tasks, urgency level, how much time is left, or even assign a color to a particular person, to whom the task belongs. You can also format the chart to spread it out or bring it closer together depending on how many tasks you have in your chart that need to be completed.
How easy was that? Not easy at all? Did setting up the Gantt chart manually take you longer than the actual project you were working on? Do you still want to use a Gantt chart to help prioritize the different tasks for your team or find a better way to do it? Well if so then your answer is here!
Your new and improved savior is here! Enter Priority Matrix; this super hero of a program will help you create a Gantt Chart in minutes or you can test out all the other prioritization tools that it provides.
Making a Gantt chart isn’t easy and more than likely you did not have a super fun time trying to figure it out. Plus have to constantly go in a change the days you’ve made progress on and if you need to add a new task then you have to start all over again with a new Gantt chart. If you don’t feel like taking all that time and commitment on a chart that you’ll be done with after a couple of days then you should check out Priority Matrix.