Gantt chart template with tutorial

In the world of software development, agile scrum is often misunderstood by critics as “working without a plan and hoping for the best.” Being able to adjust to learning doesn’t imply a lack of strategy or product goals. After all, even if something is planned to the tiniest detail and executed flawlessly, it can still fail.

To help you demonstrate a plan for your product goals and report on your progress, you can use a Gannt chart. What is it? What are the benefits and best practices for creating one? You’ll learn all of this and more in today’s article!

What is a Gantt chart?

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart showing a project’s tasks and activities. Those elements are highlighted in a way to symbolize the length of time a specific task (or its part) will take. The granularity of a Gantt chart can differ and it can show times dedicated to specific goals, epics, or, as already mentioned, single tasks.

Benefits of a Gantt chart

Gantt charts help managers and teams plan, monitor, and communicate the progress and status of a project. It’s also great at identifying and highlighting dependencies between different projects and thus, visualizing potential delay risks and important organizational initiatives.

Some of the benefits of using a Gantt chart include:

• Providing a high-level overview of the project scope, goals, and milestones
• Improving efficiency and helping to manage resources by showing the duration, order, and dependencies of tasks
• Allowing for better tracking of the project performance and quality by comparing the planned and actual timelines
• Illustrating the overlaps and dependencies of tasks, which can help identify potential risks and bottlenecks
• Offering high visibility for stakeholders and team members, which can improve collaboration and accountability
• Having a flexible format that can be customized to suit different project needs and preferences

Best practices when creating a Gantt chart

It should be no surprise that to create this chart, everything within your project needs to already be in order. To proceed you will also need to have your team estimate the tasks in the backlog and tell you how those estimations translate into time they will take. Typically, tasks in a product backlog are estimated on a logarithmic scale, where 1s are really simple endeavors that get more challenging and carry more unknowns as the estimation grows to 3,5, 8, 12, and beyond.

Those translations don’t need to be rock solid, but you need some idea of what time investment to expect from specific tasks. If you and your team are not sure, you can try to measure how tasks of different estimations historically took on average.

Half a sprint should be your minimal unit of time when it comes to creating a Gannt chart. That is because you need to have some “wiggle room” when creating any code — having hours or even days as your base time is simply unrealistic and will never be accurate, regardless of how much planning effort you will invest.

With those prerequisites in place, here are some best practices you should follow when creating a Gantt chart in any software:

• Simplicity and clarity — Focus on presenting something that can be comprehended at a glance. You can have a more detailed version elsewhere and be ready to answer questions if those appear, but the Gantt chart itself needs to be easy to understand
• Choose the best way to group your initiatives — Depending on the size and number of teams as well as strategic items to tackle, consider grouping your Gantt chart bars by:
  • Teams/subteams or specific team members
  • Strategic initiatives
  • OKRs or goals
  • Types of initiative (backend/frontend/post-release actions like marketing)
  • Levels of confidence/risk associated with specific bar/track
• Focus on highlighting dependencies — This is the biggest value you can take from putting this all together and it can uncover a team that has too many dependencies across the company
• A Gantt chart is only a high-level plan — You need to have agile freedom and not have “Gantt chart promises police” on your back each time a new opportunity arises or too many team members become sick at the same time
• Make this chart easily accessible — It’s not a single “presented and forgotten” case, but a living organism you can often reference
• Look into automating the Gantt chart creation — The worst you can have is to be forced into providing similar project management data into different systems, effectively multiplying that already painful work

Gantt chart template

A Gantt chart can be created using various tools, such as software applications, plugins (i.e. for project management software Jira), and online platforms. While those options are of course available, they might be overkill for a task as simple as creating this project plan and progress visualization. You should be just fine crafting them in plain Google Sheets using this template:

Just make sure to update the dates and either merge or split cells depending on how long a specific initiative will take. Of course, feel free to add or remove rows (bars) depending on your needs, teams, or however you wish to present this. If something is dependent on another team, I suggest using two colors to make that visible.

Final thoughts

As you can see, equipped with the right know-how, a Gantt chart shouldn’t be scary, nor force you to feel too much like a project manager, despite being a product manager. As mentioned in the opening of this article, even if you are a PM in an agile setup, you need to have a plan and be able to demonstrate it to your leadership and managers.

Gantt charts can be a great tool to make this plan visual, easy to follow, and help you identify potentially risky dependencies. The best practices listed along with the provided template should work great for you and help you get started!

Featured image source: IconScout

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