You don’t have to be a visual learner to be a fan of the Gantt chart. It visually shows to your stakeholders how your project has tasks assigned to responsible people with due dates. From executives to individual contributors, your stakeholders can see the task durations and dependencies. They can point out the milestones on their radar. They can see your progress.
Know your critical path
As the project manager, you can see your critical path which helps you identify when you should escalate and how high you should go. Some issues can stay amber as the team works through them while others trigger a red flag alert — all hands on deck!
In today’s world of technology project management, teams’ work products are interdependent. The product and engineering teams both need to come together to map the dependencies for the project manager. These subject matter experts (SMEs) will know the less obvious dependencies and will assign most likely durations based on their experience. Tech projects today have a lot of dependencies — it takes the whole team to get them right.
When you see red
Once the Gantt is ready to go, don’t just lock it in and work to achieve every line item. Be more iterative with it! Many years ago, I walked into a project that was red… super red… red flag alert… all hands on deck! My first step was to get grounded on the Gantt chart. It showed how the team was months behind on their tasks — it was obvious they (now we) were not going to make the deadline. We had to address this head on.
We looked at each tasks to see which we could remove and how we could reduce the scope of the remaining ones to cut down their durations. We looked at our dependencies to see if we could do more tasks in parallel. We reevaluated how we were making decisions. With teams in NJ, India and the UK, we had to change our decision models to follow-the-sun so we could expedite key decisions and reduce our wait time.
Work smarter not harder
We didn’t just keep working hard and pushing out dates, we changed how we were working. We reduced the friction on the team by streamlining this work, aligning to due dates and resetting our stakeholders view of the milestones. Our new Gantt reflected our reality and didn’t just push out dates to make our milestones.
Thanks Henry Gantt.
#physicsinmanagement
Blue Cairn 