The obvious question comes to people's minds after I've shown them a milestone chart and work breakdown structure, is this. What they ask would happen? Like, if a milestone chart got married to a work breakdown structure, and they had children? What would the children look like? Well, there are a number of answers to that, depending on which children we're looking at. But the communists have children that are spawned from focus on time that we have with milestones.

And the focus on activities, products that we have with a work breakdown structure is the Gantt chart. The Gantt chart shows activities and time, the same chart Gantt charts were not invented by Henry ganz. But he popularized them. He wrote about them in English. And he set the rules that we still use today. We draw charts.

And on the horizontal axis, we have time. And we have by convention, equal to visions of the horizontal axis representing equal amounts of time. And we list down the vertical access, access a list of all of the things that we need to do. That's what our work breakdown structure gives us. People who go straight to Gantt charts without doing a work breakdown structure are far more prone to miss tasks off. So another good argument for doing the work breakdown structure.

We then place each task onto our Gantt chart using a bar and the length of the bar represents the duration of the task. The positioning of the bar on the chart on the horizontal axis represents the scheduling of the task. So one bar following immediately from another represents one activity happening immediately after another. And usually, that is because you can't start the second activity until the first is complete. when that's the case, that is known as a dependency, strictly speaking, it is a finish to start dependency. And if all of the dependencies that are theoretically possible, that is the most robust kind of dependency to base your planning on.

And indeed, in some high end, critical project management environments is the only form of dependency that project managers should and will therefore be using. However, it's worth noting that one other kind of dependency can appear on some projects with some frequency and that is a finish to finish dependency. Think about cooking Everything is planned around completing the project at a specific time. So all of the elements of the meal are ready at the same time. And that's a finish to finish dependency. So what we get is a long chain of activities along diagonal on our chart of dependent sequence of dependent activities.

And that's often our work stream mirroring the work streams vertically down the graphical representation, the work breakdown structure, but there may be other work streams happening in parallel at the same time, as long as they're not reliant on exactly the same sources. Or maybe they are but the people are working part time one and the other and independent streams give us our work streams. And of course, we can use symbols to represent milestones on our Gantt charts. project managers are often quite dull people. My best friends, but we don't tend to use fancy symbols. We tend to go with triangles or diamonds, simple, simple to represent milestones and we can label positions on our Gantt charts to make sure it's easy to read the dates.

You can label bars with the people who are responsible, responsible for carrying out the actions. So again, chart is a splendid tool for doing two things. Firstly, for helping you think through the sequencing and the scheduling, the overlap activities that create your schedule, your plan, your sometimes called your program, work. And the second thing they're particularly good at this stage is for communicating the plan, the program work, who's doing what and when, and what's going on simultaneously. What happens after we finish this, what needs to happen before we start at. The third thing that they're good at is once the project moves into the delivery stage, the other basis for monitoring and reporting, our project we need to do is draw a vertical line through the Gantt chart to represent a day and we could see exactly what should be going on.

We can then go and speak to the people who are doing work, look for the objective measures and shade in our activity bars to show the level of completion. And where the shading extends beyond the today line, we're ahead of schedule and where it doesn't reach us today line, you're behind schedule, and therefore the program or project manager, your focus and attention goes on the work streams are behind schedule. You spent a short amount of time with those that are head in order to give recognition and praise for the work that's been done. But then you look to see what remedial work you can put in play to ensure that the project catches up on the behind schedule, work streams. So a Gantt chart is a phenomenally powerful tool. I'm often asked What tools to use for creating a Gantt chart?

Well, we'll have a look at that in the next video.