How Can a Gantt Chart Tool Help You with Your Projects?

You should have probably heard about any Gantt chart tool before now. There are many applications that provide basic Gantt charts, but do you have a clear vision of how your projects can benefit from using a Gantt chart? There are so many questions that arise when trying to manage a team or multiple teams. Teams on projects are different and questions are different. How can you predict the completion of your tasks? How can your team be more productive? How do you organize a workflow in the most efficient way for each team member?

Those questions come to team leads regardless of the tools they use. But can the tools actually help resolve these questions and get the most of each team member’s strengths? Can any application provide a neat visual project scope even if it is quite a long-term project? Here’s when the Gantt chart steps in. Surprisingly, many team leads and project managers never considered a Gantt chart to be this visual tool helping with projects.

What is a Gantt chart?

To simplify the definition, a Gantt chart is a horizontal chart with bars representing tasks in a project. The first chart of such kind was drawn by Henry Laurence Gantt in the early 20th century and later was named after him. Gantt charts help to get a visualization of the whole project in one glance.

As the progress went, Gantt charts evolved from drawings into full-fledged online Gantt software. It also boosted their popularity, because they have many variations, from simple solutions to charts that can support complex projects.

Here’s an example of a sketchy Gantt chart that you may draw with a good old pen and paper.

Benefits of using Gantt chart tools

The simplicity of the Gantt charts brings on the table of project management a wide range of benefits. These benefits unveil the reasons for Gantt chart tools being so widespread and popular.

• Everyone can grasp complex information about a project in a simple visual way.
  
• You clearly see how your team resources are allocated, who is working on what task and when.
• Standartizing is easy. In any part of the world, Gantt charts will look the same which makes it easy to introduce new team members to your work.
• You can minimize or even eliminate the risk of tasks overlapping.
• Provides you with an advantage at the planning stage. You can organize your thoughts and re-organize the tasks with a single click.
• Breaks complex projects down to small digestible pieces of work.
• Highlights the impact of delays in one task on other tasks and the overall project.
• Free time from less important things to the more important. At least you are saving time on explaining the details to team members or updating them on any changes.
• Make it easier to delegate effectively. Each team member will have all the necessary details on a chart.
• Helps you to be flexible and adapt to changes rapidly. With a Gantt chart tool at your disposal, you can change the dates or other details in a minute or two.
• You are more likely to avoid expensive mistakes when using a Gantt chart. It will help you to discover problems at the early stages and approach them more wisely.

What else can I get with modern Gantt chart apps?

There are a lot of applications that provide online Gantt charts. All you need is to define whether you want a separate solution for the Gantt chart only or you will benefit more from the app that will provide some complex solution for project management. Of course, you can still use pen and paper to draw your charts. However, this may only work for some school projects nowadays. And even school projects are now so complex that may not be fit into one piece of paper.

When you go for a cloud app it will provide your team with a shared tool that can be used to collaborate more efficiently. The flexibility of the online apps, the easy way of adjusting to your needs can turn even the most complex project with tough deadlines into the pure art of project management.

To choose among many alternatives, you should set a list of criteria. Should the app have other project management tools? Kanban boards? Tasklist? Time tracking option? Integration with your familiar office suits, like Google Workspace? Having clear criteria will make the process of choosing faster and will save you from the wrong choice. If you are still not sure what to begin with, Kanbanchi may be a good choice for you because it fits most of the common criteria for Gantt charts and for project management apps as a whole.

Gantt chart tool within Kanbanchi

Kanbanchi application is easy to start with. Apart from the Gantt chart it also includes Kanban boards and is integrated with Google Workspace. More than that, the Gantt chart and Kanban board are synchronized in real-time – changes made on your Gantt chart will be instantly shown on the kanban board and vice versa. This powerful combination allows you to switch between the Gantt chart and Kanbanchi board in a second.

Gantt chart is the tool inside Kanbanchi App that we recommend project managers and team leads to use. They will be always updated on what is going on and will always be on the right track. The interface is easy and intuitive, even the less tech-savvy member of your team will quickly pick it up.

You can apply this flexible and agile-styled approach to any type of project in any industry. Regardless of the complexity of your project, the combination of a Gantt chart and Kanban board will be a very beneficial tool in your team’s hands.