Download the Guide to Project Planning for Free: http://bit.ly/2efbWtu Read the full blog post: http://bit.ly/2e0XrvM There are a few things you should do to make your plan easy to understand for everyone involved. Here are 8 best practices you need to know when building your gantt chart to make sure it will be as useful as possible: 1. Enter tasks in groups Creating Groups of Tasks will make your plan easier to read, and it will allow your readers to see what tasks are part of a deliverable, or a phase. 2. Get granular with tasks The more detail you can spell out when it comes to tasks, the better you will be able to track progress and steps leading up to a deliverable. Refer back to your Work Breakdown Structure and list the steps you used to create that. 3. Identify responsible parties Identifying who is responsible for each task will help your readers to easily seek out their tasks. When creating a task, you can easily put the team name (or an acronym) in front of the task. You’ll also want to take that a step further and assign a responsible person for each task. This will help you with resource planning and accountability. Here we used PT for Product Team and GM for Gantt Museum. 4. Be sure to display start and end dates for each task It seems like a silly tip, but it’s easy to hide this info in some apps! If you’re using TeamGantt, you’ll see the dates in the gantt view. Regardless of what tool you’re using, you want to make it clear not only when a task ends, but when it starts. Again, this will help to keep your team and clients accountable. 5. Account for time off and holidays Now is your chance to block time off in your plan. This is important now, because as soon as your timeline shifts, and you know it will, don’t fight it, you’ll open yourself up to making an error and dropping a deadline on a date that should be blocked. If you note them in your plan, that won’t happen. 6. Note dependencies If you’re not going to move forward on the project without an approval, or one task must be done before another, now is your chance to note it. Not every planning tool offers dependency functionality, and it can be a huge help. As your plan shifts, the flow of the work will stay in tact. And just a note here. We don’t just make great project management content like this at TeamGantt. We also make web based project management software used by thousands of teams in over 60 countries. With TeamGantt you can easily tackle all the best practices in this video and MUCH more. For a free 30 day trial, visit teamgantt.com/signup. 7. Use the notes field to capture details Sometimes our team and clients forget what they committed to, or maybe they don’t fully understand the intent of a task or group. Use the notes section of your plan (most good gantt software should provide this) to spell things out. 8. Check team availability If you’re lucky enough to use a product that shows you overall team availability, you better use it! Knowing how your team is booked and what projects they are a part of will play a huge role in how on time your project will be. Having an overall view of their time available and conflicting work will help you to adjust your plan to either meet the needs of existing project work or shift the milestones you’ve put in your plan. If you deliver a plan that has a mistake, misinterprets a task, or even misses a date, you’ll end up looking bad. People can lose faith in project managers easily, so you must be diligent about the quality of your work. Grab a teammate and ask them to review the plan before you post it for review. Of course, you’ll also want to be ready to get some feedback on your plan. Formalizing a plan means that you’re taking a set of ideas and expanding on them. That also means that you might interpret something differently than a teammate. That’s okay! If you set up your plan using the guidelines in this post, you’ll have an easy time of managing and updating.

8 Best Practices You Need to Know When Building Your Gantt Chart 5.0

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