Is there a quick & easy way for project managers to know what’s going on in their project, when work is due, and who is doing which tasks? Enter, the Gantt Chart – one of the most popular and useful ways of visualizing a project’s timeline and schedule.
A Gantt Chart gives you a bird’s eye view of a project, helping you track and monitor the progress of individual tasks against a planned schedule. In other words, it’s a visual roadmap of your project or business activities.
Our Gantt Chart template is a horizontal bar chart designed in Excel with everything you need to get an overview of your project available to you at a glance — a task list, start and end dates, task duration, task dependencies, and task status, all in one single location.
Now, let’s explore our template in more detail:
Project Overview
Right at the top of our template, we identify and describe the project as a whole, including its name and official starting date.
We also identify the project lead (usually the Project Manager) who is responsible for overseeing the planning, procurement, and execution of a project.
Task ID & Name
The first two columns will identify and describe each specific task, creating an itemized list of all the action items you will be tracking with our Gantt Chart template.
The use of a task ID makes it easier to club together tasks of a similar nature or tasks meant to be performed by one particular member of the project team.
Assignee
In this column, we sort tasks by the assignee. In other words, it’s time to identify who is doing what.
It is important to make sure each task is assigned to the right member of the team. This requires project leads to assess the talents and abilities of individual team members to ensure they are a good fit. In our template, you can make a list of available individuals and use the dropdown on the Gantt chart to assign tasks.
Quarters designed – as per start date – calendar of Gantt chart – months precision – four quarters in a year
Start & End Date
We have devised our Gantt timeline on a quarterly basis: Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4. The month-span of these quarters will depend on the Start Date you enter at the top of our template, which is, the day your project takes off.
In the Start and End Date columns in the mainsheet, you will place every task inside a time frame. Based on the start & end dates you manually enter in our template, we calculate the total duration of each task.
Each task will then be visually mapped out on the calendar with a bar. We use differently colored bars to make it easy for you to track different tasks. For example, if a task starts in the first week of January, and ends in the last week of March – the color bar will extend from January, February to March.
As a rule of thumb, you should always select the earliest possible start date and the latest possible end date for every task – this will give you the greatest amount of flexibility and ensure that any performance-related risks do not negatively affect your workflow. To identify and manage project risks, feel free to use our Risk Matrix and Risk Register template.
Status
In this section, we simply want to get a sense of which tasks have been completed, which are currently in progress, which ones are facing a delay, and which ones have been deliberately put on hold.
In our template, we have used three categories to update task status: In Progress, Completed, and On Hold. However, we have attached a configuration sheet to our template where you can use different categories to suit your specific project needs and context.
Winding Up
While it’s true our Gantt Chart template can be used for projects of all sizes, it is particularly useful for simplifying larger projects to break down complex workflows and manage multiple teams or departments. Moreover, since most modern projects have many moving parts and dependent relationships, a scheduling tool like a Gantt Chart can give project leads and stakeholders a high-level view of how units of work within a project are connected and progressing as the project moves along.
Our editable Gantt Chart Template can be downloaded in .xlsx, .xltx, and .ods formats.
Be aware that spreadsheets are somewhat prone to error. Even if the spreadsheet is completely free of errors at the time you download it, there is always a possibility that you might accidentally introduce errors as you edit it. That’s why we would recommend using this Gantt Chart template only if you are comfortable using Excel and can identify and fix errors that may be introduced. With that said, download and enjoy!
