Planning Work Streams with Gantt Charts

00:02 Wow. This project is really flying now.

00:05 Remember last lesson when I said Workstreams could be executed in parallel? Of course you do. The thing is, this doesn't mean that they necessarily start at the same time. What we need is a way to list the activities in a way that we can see when they start and when they finish.

00:23 Have your calendars at the ready because here comes the Gantt-Chart, the one we mentioned way back in the history lesson, remember? The Gantt-Chart represents something very simple, yet extremely useful.

00:37 It lists all the activities from our activity list on the y axis of a table.

00:42 A calendar with days, weeks and months is positioned on the top of the table, the x axis. The durations of the activities are drawn right below the calendar day.

00:51 You can now see the start date and the end date with the difference equaling the duration of the task.

00:59 Do you see how easy it is to visualize our project activities now? The duration, dependency, start and end dates are also clear to see. For now, though, let's look at how our activities fit into the chart. We'll start with the critical path.

01:15 Makes sense, right? So A is our first task.

01:20 That's the easy part.

01:22 As the project manager, though, it's your job to decide when to execute the other streams. So think about this.

01:31 M recruit personnel is a nice, quick activity, which you could start immediately within the interview process starting soon after.

01:40 This means you could have the whole stream complete by week 11, but that leaves a long time before the showroom is set to open.

01:48 What if the staff you hired and trained find other jobs or they forget the training? Hiring more staff and training them will add time and cost to the project. So with that in mind, it seems that the best thing to do is to start the process at week 23, 11 weeks before the project is due to be completed. Right.

02:09 But what happens if we run into a situation like our non straightforward task from a few lessons ago? Remember where our task of getting one candidate profile took four times longer than we estimated, starting precisely 11 weeks before the project is complete means you won't have a buffer to account for a delay such as this.

02:31 Your job as project manager will be to assess the risks and think of any potential problems that may occur with the scheduling.

02:38 So for argument's sake, let's say we start with this path at week 18 for our project, this seems to leave us with an adequate buffer.

02:47 This, though, is not an exact science.

02:51 Each project manager must assess and determine their own schedule based on their experience and expertise.

02:57 Now let's see how we could fill in our chart.

03:02 Hey. Looks good to me.

03:04 And the benefits of this chart are that you can see how all the activities fit together in a calendar and will help you form a strategy if there are any changes to the critical path. Okay.

03:15 At this point, you should be well equipped to start scheduling the project.

03:20 It's what all these methods have been building up to.

03:23 So hold onto your hats and see you.

03:25 Next lesson.