Gantt Charts

Today we were talking about Gantt Charts in class. As a reminder, and for those interested, this is the website I was showing in class to demonstrate the different ideas and how they were developed over the years.

Remember when using Gantt Charts, there is no right answer as it will have to be changed as you work through a project. For example, something might happen that you did not plan for and a certain activity will take one (or more) weeks longer than expected. Therefore you would have to go and move all your future plans to adjust for this change. But the idea is that it will then tell you when the actual project will finish.

As an example, the image above is a Gantt Chart that I made for some Year 11 pupils (direct link to the spreadsheet I used - select the option at the bottom for 'Gantt Chart') last year when they were starting one of their GCSE projects.

You will see that at the top it has different dates, for example, "January 31st 2010", "February 7th 2010", etc - each of these is the start of a week.
The project started in the last week in January 2010 and finished near the end of March 2010.

• The 'Introduction' section took almost three weeks
• The 'Information System Report' took four weeks.
• The 'Leaflet Design Completion' took three weeks.

Notice also that some of these tasks also started before you were finished a previous task - like you do when working on tasks sometimes!

Do you understand Gantt Charts more now? They are challenging to understand for the first time but hopefully you will start to make more sense as you practice them more :)

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below :)