Sub Topic
IndustrializationVisualization
History
Date | Method |
Kanban | |
Swim Lane Diagram | |
Gantt Charts |
Kanban
Swim Lane Diagrams
Gantt Charts
The Gantt chart is a visualization made a staple of project management for decades in part by the popular application Microsoft Project. It visualizes projects as a set of interdependent tasks where the horizontal axis is calendar time and each task occupies one row. The task duration is shown as a rectangle stretching left from the start date to the end date; task interdependencies are optionally illustrated by a thin leader line interconnecting one task’s end to the next task’s start. The Gantt chart is popular and, in the hands of trained experts, is a powerful tool [3]. Despite that, it’s avoided here owing to the inherent difficulty of most users to control granularity. This is demonstrated by the all-too-common problem where users add tasks of ever-decreasing granularity to form an incomprehensible tangle of a project plan. It seems people feel obligated to add tasks of the smallest consequence so that Gantt charts can grow to many pages—so long that the structure of the project is lost in the detail of hundreds of small tasks. Then, when something mid-project changes that demands that structure change, as inevitably happens in knowledge work, updating the Gantt chart becomes a Herculean task, which of course, no one has time for in the busy days after problems are discovered. The Gantt chart can then become quickly outdated; project management becomes chaotic as the Gantt chart becomes less and less relevant over time. These problems are similar to those of the long Action Plan described in Section 9.3.2. As stated above, the Gantt chart is a popular tool and many people are successful with it. My experience is that people who have formal project management training such as that necessary to be certified as a Project Management Professional [4] (PMP) by the Project Management Institute (PMI) often do well.
