The benefits of using a Gantt chart for scheduling are that it provides an overview of the project’s schedules and tasks from start to finish using a timeline.
List of Gantt chart benefits
- Identifying project tasks
- Adding tasks to a timeline and seeing how long each task will take to complete by including the start and completion time for each task
- Helping meet a teams’ scheduling needs
- Assigning tasks to specific individuals or titles
- Adding task dependencies to help determine if a task depends on another task to get completed or started
- Filtering through tasks to see important aspects of a project that pertain to a specific team member or task
- Monitoring team progress to get a holistic view of schedules and deadlines to help determine work capacity and project completion time
- Facilitating informed communication with team members
- Evaluating a team’s work and promoting accountability
- Determining the order tasks need to get completed
- Breaking down a large project into digestible tasks
- Showing how tasks relate to each other
- Having many tools for creating Gantt charts, such as ProofHub, Smartsheet, Microsoft Project, Click Up, Toggl Plan, GanttPRO, eamGantt, Monday, ProofHub, Wrike
It would help to understand the benefits of using a Gant chart for scheduling purposes by also listing a Gantt’s chart drawbacks.
List of Gantt chart drawbacks
- Setting up a Gantt chart is time-consuming because project tasks need to be identified before the product begins
- Determining how tasks are related can be a challenge
- The Gantt char will start to get cluttered as the number of tasks increase
- Adding dependencies to each task adds to the complexity of the chart but does not provide a holistic view of the dependencies. Usually, a PERT chart is used in conjunction with a Gantt chart
- Gantt charts do not list tasks based on priority
- The time it takes to complete each task will not be an actual representation of the work effort needed if the timeline is not accurate