Tracking a project with Gantt Chart

In Project Manager a project can be viewed in Gantt Chart. Gantt Chart provides graphical presentation of project schedule. It displays order of tasks and their duration with the use of colored bars. Gantt Chart is useful in project planning and scheduling – it helps you identify potential scheduling problems and plan project stages for a point in time.

The picture below shows a sample project created in Project Manager, “Managing Virtual Teams”. It is displayed in Gantt Chart in Project Manager main window. The project includes four tasks – “Setting up virtual office”, “Setting teleconferencing tools”, “Software installation”, and “Tech support”:

The Gantt Chart window is split into three parts. Tasks are listed on the left of the window. Center of the window displays dates of project lifetime on the top and colored bars corresponding to project tasks. Each task is represented with two bars:

• The upper bar stands for actual task duration, starting with the first day of a task. A complete task is represented by the upper bar colored in light grey (“Setting up virtual office”, “Setting teleconferencing tools”). Its end point corresponds to a task’s completion date. An incomplete task is shown by the dark grey bar, where end point is today’s date (“Software installation”, “Tech support”). Today’s date is shown by a vertical red line that runs thru a bar. 
• The lower bar is split into two adjacent parts. The left side of the bar is colored in green and corresponds to the planned task duration, from the start to due date. The right side of the bar is colored in pink, runs past the tasks due date, and stands for an overdue time period. A green only lower bar indicates that a due date has not been met yet or the task was completed on its due date. A task without specified due date does not have lower bar (“Tech support”).

The right side of the window displays three numbers for every task in the following form: actual/planned/overdue. Actual (shown in black) is the actual number of days of a task (from start to either today’s or completion date). Planned (shown in green) is the number of days between start and due dates. Overdue (shown in pink) – number of days past due date. For the “Software Installation” task shown on the picture above, the days are given as 44/21/23. The task is incomplete. It was started on 02/15/07 with the due date set as 03/07/07. The numbers indicate that there are 44 days from the start of the task till today’s date (03/30/07) and the task is 23 days overdue.

Modifying Gantt Chart view
By default the whole project lifetime is displayed in Gantt Chart window. The top line of the chart shows all project months of the calendar year between (and including) first and last project months. The last project month could be project completion date, today’s date, or the latest due date of all tasks. This default chart interval is called “Fit to Project” and is set as 01/12/07 thru 03/30/07 for “Managing Virtual Teams” project. 

If you would like to have you project displayed in a different time period, you need to define visible interval. Click View -> Define Visible Interval and set interval start and end days. The smallest interval you can set is one month. If you define “February 2007 – February 2007” visible interval for the project, the tasks bars will be scaled to one month time period in the following way:

If a project contains many tasks (both complete and incomplete), you can choose between displaying both kinds of tasks or incomplete only. Click View -> Hide Complete Tasks to display only incomplete tasks. To go back to the full list of tasks, click View -> Show Complete Tasks.