Business Process Management Center

Monitor Your Progress with Gantt Charts

The milestone worksheet (see above) helps provide the foundation for one of the most useful project management diagrams—the Gantt chart. Gantt charts are bar graphs that help plan and monitor project development or resource allocation on a horizontal time scale.

Typically, Gantt charts indicate the duration of specific tasks, but they can also be used to indicate the relationship between tasks, planned and actual completion dates, cost of each task, the person or persons responsible for each task, and the milestones in a project's development

To learn how to create Gantt charts in SmartDraw, read the SmartDraw Gantt Chart Tutorial.

Other Timeline Tools

You can also use a PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) chart, an Activity Network Diagram, CPM (Critical Path Method), or Arrow Diagram to define the order of tasks in a project and identify bottlenecks and critical tasks.

A PERT chart consists of a network of numbered nodes (either circles or rectangles) representing events, tasks, or milestones in the project. These tasks are linked by directional lines that show dependencies between tasks. Each node can list not only the specific task but also the person or department responsible as well as an estimate of how long the given task will take to complete.

SmartDraw provides a number of PERT chart libraries and templates to make creating these charts a snap.