Gantt Charts, PERT Charts – What Use Are They?
Summary Gantt charts and PERT charts are very useful tools for visualising and communicating information about projects, but they have a number of limitations. In addition, the ease with which they can be created using software applications makes them open to misuse and misinterpretation. Project Breakdown Part of the problem is that there isn’t a clear understanding of how to break the project down in the first place, and using Gantt chart software to do this isn’t necessarily the best way of going about it. A common method of breaking a project down is using a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). This concentrates on analysing the scope of the project according to its outcomes or deliverables. This method of breakdown does not necessarily imply any dependencies (logic) or sequence, hence neither the Gantt chart nor the PERT chart are suitable tools for carrying out this analysis. Project Management Methodologies such as Prince 2 also seek to analyse the project in terms of deliverables (“
