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Firstly, I am a programmer writing a software for analysing gantt charts.

Can someone please explain what types of analysis that project managers often do based on these gantt charts? What types of information do project managers derive from the gantt chart? What things can be automated and what cannot? Why?

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What kind of analysis is your software supposed to do? That is, what question(s) is the output of your software supposed to help answer? – Mark Phillips♦ Aug 27 '12 at 17:05
Jake, it sounds like you have a lot of questions about project management. Is there something more specific you could ask our community of experts? We thrive on helping people solve problems, not just giving people lists of things. If you can edit with more specifics, then great. If not, I'll leave this open for the community to decide. If you do get some good answers from this, I hope you use that info to ask us some more specific questions! :) Hope this helps! – jmort253♦ Aug 28 '12 at 1:02
@MarkPhillips that's the exact question i am asking -- what kind of (perhaps common) analysis do Project Managers analyse from Gantt Charts. Need the terminologies so I can look up it further. – Jake Aug 28 '12 at 1:14
@jmort253 Thanks for your comment. Please see my reply to MarkPhilips. The specific area of interest is project management using gantt charts. Not sure if that is specific enough. Otherwise, I'll delete the question and rethink about it. Thanks. – Jake Aug 28 '12 at 1:17
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@jmort253 I can now see from your edit how to better phrase my question. Thanks for your help. – Jake Aug 28 '12 at 4:06
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I agree with the comments you've gotten so far, the question is a little open-ended. But in the spirit of helping -

I use the Gantt chart to give me a visual representation of things that haven't happened yet. I can look at it and see the flow of the project - when things are scheduled to be done, how tasks/deliverables relate to each other (dependencies), where resources are scheduled at any given time (on not yet scheduled), important dates (milestones).

The Gantt is where all of the pieces of the project are displayed collectively. Outside of this visual aid, I have to look into various docs for information - into contracts to see when a vendor is supposed to deliver something, or when subcontractor is due to start, emails for new dates or resource issues, etc.

It also gives me a place to see the overall project (at least in terms of deliverables. My contract may have the scope and deliverables written down, but that will undoubtably take several pages. The Gantt allows me to list it all in one long list, and then view it as I need to - roll up to milestones only, a specific deliverable, print it out and hang the whole thing on the wall so I can see it all at once.

To be honest, I'm not sure how a s/w package could 'analyze' this in a way that I would find useful, but I'd like to hear how you're going about it.

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I second Trevor's description. What I would add is

  • Critical Path analysis, but this is already done by most planning software
  • Dependencies (inside or outside of the project), which require some time-buffering to mitigate possible slippage

The Gantt is only a representation of the data behind it, based upon start and finish dates (baseline, planned, actual) etc. Data can be used for all kinds of analysis. What I find useful is a "Milestone analysis", being the % that you hit your planned milestones on time (across projects). This is useful for organisations that use some 'standard' methodology for similar projects, with a defined set of milestones.

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