It is a common and popular tool, widely used in project management. It shows to management the list of activities required to be performed in order to complete a project. This list of activities is displayed against time (months, weeks, days, hours). From the chart, it can be seen the duration of activities - starting point and ending point. The various activities are arranged in the sequence that they occur - which activity comes before and which comes after. It is also possible to have overlapping activities, that is, activities which are performed at exactly or around the same time. The chart also shows to us the finishing time of the whole project.
ADVANTAGES
Gantt charts enable us to have a better understanding of a project consisting many activities. It is much easier for us to understand the complexity of a project by looking at a diagram, instead of reading a lot of notes. It helps us to organize our thoughts by breaking up a big project into many small parts, which we can see easily from the chart.
Gantt charts are very easy to design, quickly understood, and cost-efficient. With a little bit of training, anyone can be trained to draw a Gantt chart. If required, the chart can also be easily modified to reflect changes in activities or duration.
Gantt charts can be used for status reporting. The progress or work done on activities can be shown by using colours to denote uncompleted, completed or partially completed activities. This will enable those involved in the project to have a quick grasp of how well or otherwise the project is being conducted.
DISADVANTAGES
Gantt charts assume certainty in the duration of a project's activities. This differs immensely from real world situations where uncertainties are the norm. A more realistic model for project management, albeit more sophisticated, would be PERT which uses different activity duration - optimistic, most likely, pessimistic.
Gantt charts may not be suitable for use in big projects which have an excessive amount of activities. It becomes cumbersome when several project managers are involved as conflicts may arise and the whole planning process becomes jeopardized.
Gantt charts can be overly simplistic and do not show vital information, such as, critical activities, slack times, and activities which can be crashed.
Regular updating of Gantt charts may be time-consuming and thus become counter-productive.
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