Keep IT projects on schedule–part two

by | Feb/2/2011

Simple project management basics will help your IT professionals keep you informed about the ahead or behind schedule status of projects, with current predicted finish dates.

The last blog entry was about IT professionals creating a simple Work Breakdown Structure—WBS—of the steps needed to complete a project. The next step after a WBS is to create a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart puts the WBS on a calendar.

The first step is to add more information to the WBS:

  • Estimated duration for each step.
  • Dependencies such as “the prior step must be completed before the next step can start” since some steps can be started simultaneously.

Then, software can calculate the estimated start and stop dates for each step, and then overlay that information on a calendar.

Here are two examples of Gantt charts:

The third item in this three-part series will be about the PERT chart.

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