Using Project to Create a Gantt Chart

this video gives a brief introduction to using Microsoft Project to put together a Gantt chart start out by going down and selecting Microsoft Project Project 2013 is the version we're using when it pops up choose a blank project and the first thing that I suggest doing when you come into Microsoft Project is go to file options to change some of the settings number one make sure that your name is listed here you want to have your name as the identified user of any documents you create then check your date format I like to adjust my dates so that they're as compact as possible so I just use month slash day as my date format one other thing I suggest changing is go to your schedule and partway down the schedule screen you'll see new tasks created manually scheduled change that to auto schedules I would prefer that you generate tasks and then have the tasks timing be determined by dependencies not by you typing in any dates so this avoids that ok let's click OK to get ok to get out of that menu then go ahead and set up your basic project information so go to the project tab and then choose project information and then choose a start date for your project it defaults to the current date let's change this to something a little bit earlier let's say September the 28th was a start date for a project so we choose that and we can see the calendar has now shifted with the dotted line showing up on the start date for the project ok so now we need to add some tasks that's the first thing you want to do but before you even do that in Microsoft Project you want to identify what those tasks are I strongly recommend get some post-it notes write out all of the things that have to happen that you have to do in order to complete the deliverables that this project has so I have done that for a sample project that I call getting an interview so I went through and I thought of all the things that you would need to do to prepare to request an interview with a company through an on-campus career fair so I've done that list on post-it notes I then arranged those post-it notes and determine a proper order and then I took down that order in Excel I recommend you do that because you're more comfortable with Excel than you are with Microsoft Project so just type out a list so these are the list of the things that need to happen everything in the the light print here is the tasks that I thought were relevant and then I added some titles or some headers in Microsoft Project those will be summary tasks and that's just a good way of organizing things rather than a list of every single task you can group them into similar tasks that makes sense so for example I like to have a summary task wait at the top that's basically just the project thing so get an on-campus interviews mine and then there are a number of tasks that are associated with getting your resume ready for the on-campus career fair so prepare resume was my title there and then preparing for the career fair you need to find out what's happening at the career fair you need to prepare to ask questions and to provide information about yourself and of course you need to prepare your what you're going to wear for the event so prepare for the career fair covers a bunch of things and under that I've got actually got two sub summary tasks and then lastly of course you're going to attend the career fair and there are a number of things to happen there so if you've got this list that you've done on post-it notes you figured out the right order for them you've now type them into Excel Excel is not a necessary step but it makes it easier for me to demonstrate if I use Excel here so I'm going to copy those and then go over to my project window and right up at the top or yeah in the first cell under task name I can just do a ctrl V to paste them down now when I paste them you see everything over here got filled in and that's because all new tasks are auto scheduled that's the change that I made it makes Microsoft Project guess that everything is one day in length so we're going to have to make some adjustments there and it also sets everything up so that it starts on the start date for your project now all of those we change depending on dependencies that we'll get to later but for right now let's not worry about these let's focus on the tasks themselves first thing I want to do is identify the subtasks or the summary tasks and my first one is this get an on-campus interview I'm going to select everything else click the first one shift to hold down everything should be a sub task to that and if I'm going to make task changes I need to be on the tasks tab so go up to the top which is test down and now I'm going to indent the task and it will now be all of those are now sub tasks for get an on-campus interview in addition I've got some other sub tasks prepare resume has these six tasks that are sub tasks so I'm going to into those do the same thing here well prepare for career fair career fair actually preparation is all the way down to here so I'm going to end it all of those as a sub task for preparing for career fair but then in addition preparing the talking points has its own set of sub tasks and getting your wardrobe has its own set of sub tasks and then lastly I've got some sub tasks for attending a career fair okay now suppose that I made a mistake and I realized that in fact the identifying my interest may be that should happen somewhere else well I can click it and then I let go so that's a single click and then I can drag that task let's say identify my interest that's really more important to listen listing my strengths and experiences so I could move tasks that easily I'm going to move this one back because what I rent by it was identifying that you're companies of interest so it does deserve to be in the section with the companies okay so we've got the project up here we've got the tasks identified and we've got summary tasks this little triangle by the way if you click that it will minimize that summary tasks so if you've got a lot of individual tasks sometimes it's easier to look at the summaries for now let's keep everything full open okay so now let's look at relationships between tasks you can see right now every task is sitting right on the start date by default that's what happens but sometimes things need to happen one after another so let's look at this list of things for drafting or for preparing your resume I suggested you need to draft it review it with friends do a revision then take a degree or center for a review there then revise it again and then print some copies all of those are tasks that need to happen in sequence there's not any overlap between those so if I highlight all of those tasks and then I come up here and I click the link button it will link them all together one after the other and by default the link that shows up is a finish to start link so this task task number four or five needs to finish before tab then the following tasks starts I can change that I'm going to double click on this just right on one of the arrows there and I can see there's my task dependency so I can change this to a start to start or a finish to finish or start to finish or I can introduce a lag so maybe I need a little bit of sync time between these two tasks well use that later I'll just cancel out of that menu let's do some more down here obtaining a list of companies and then identifying which ones you're interested in and then researching those again those three things need to happen in sequence so I'm going to link them all there might of course be a little bit of research that happens before you identify your interest because you might not know anything about the company prepare your talking points so listing your strengths and then creating an elevator chat those two things have to happen in sequence but listing your key questions does not have to happen in the same sequence so strengths create the elevator chat list key questions does anything you have to happen before that well you probably want to know what the company is before that one so I can select list key questions and then research companies holding down the ctrl key oh look what happened because I selected list key questions first that was the one that had to finish before research companies so be careful with that you can get rid of this by double-clicking on it and deleting it and then you can come back and choose research companies and then list key questions and create your link now it's going in the right direction all right professional attire review your wardrobe you should review your wardrobe we can or you go out and buy some new things and then attending the career fair you certainly need to visit a company before you can give them your elevator chat and you probably want to do the elevator chat before you ask questions so we'll do all of those and you probably want to do all those things before you ask for an interview so in fact those should go in sequence all right so I've got some dependencies you can see over here on the right that I have been generating my initial Gantt chart it looks a little bit plain right now because everything is assumed to take one day but did we miss any dependencies let's take a look preparing for the career fair obtaining a list of companies well you have to have make sure the list is available there so we'll take a look at that later attending the career fair oh we can't attend the career fair until we've prepared for the career fair so there is a link between these subtasks and you really shouldn't attend the career fair until you've prepared a resume so I grab prepare resume and then attend career fair so you see I've got two arrows here heading down that's perfectly all right that just says that this summary task of attending career fair can't occur until both of these other tasks have finished all right so now we need to enter some time durations and these you want to do your best guess of how much time it will actually take you to complete that task in real time so not if I sat down and concentrated I could do this in one hour but realistically you're going to need to reach people you're going to have meals you're going to have classes how about time will it take to draft a resume so let's say that takes a week I can do one W it recognizes that as a week you're going to review it with friends suppose you give them three days to do some reviews you'll revise it hopefully not a lot of revisions of two days good for that Career Center or Career Services you might need a couple days to get in there so I'm going to do three days there and then again revise hopefully not a lot of revision so one day and then printing is obviously pretty quick because it will do one hour for that this is as that's as simple as it goes to enter your information about how long tasks take and you can see that all gets expanded over this is the beauty of having a scheduling happening automatically it's generating your time chart for you you don't have to put the dates in just the dependencies and the durations and as long as you get that all right things should work out correctly okay so obtaining a list of companies that should just take an hour identifying your interest it should be fairly quick but let's give yourself three hours to go through that list and then some research you probably want a few days to do that okay listing your strengths take a couple of days to think that one through creating an elevator chat you probably wanted another three days at least to do that and then heat questions hopefully that won't take you long let's say a day reviewing your wardrobe I hope it's not so big that an hour would not be enough but did I take you a full day to get some replacements you're gonna have to find the right places visiting companies I'll just put in some some quick estimates here let's say just 30 minutes or most of whoops 30min mi means mile it won't recognize that 30 minutes for elevator chats key questions let's say 15 minutes and then ask for an interview is 10 minutes so you can see these are different durations that you can enter all right um so now I'm going to take another look at this how do things standing over here well it's it's got to be doing a whole lot right at the beginning does that make sense well maybe not realistically I can't really obtain a list of companies until it's available from the career services and let's say I find out that Career Service is going to have that available on October 10th so I can enter ten ten here and it looks like everything I've been scheduling has been accidentally in 2017 so I'm going to cancel this these pop-up windows happen occasionally you learn things so I'm going to go back to project and project information and I'm going to enter nine 2816 as my project started so now everything's shifted back to this 2:16 I didn't notice it was on the timeline but I didn't notice and now I can go to obtaining my list of companies and oops double-click opens up tasks information we'll look at that again in a moment I'm going to delete that date and say well this has to happen no earlier than 10:10 and it's shifted over now and everything then follows beyond that so this you only want to do if there's a firm date if instead you want to say well I don't want to start getting my list of companies until after I have or maybe I'm just going to do it when I go to the Career Center if I do that then review with Career Center and obtain list of companies those are now linked I want to do that at the same time that's fine we go to tasks we create a link by default that became a finish to start link but it doesn't need to be if I double tap it that could easily be a start to start so you want to get the list of companies when you drop off your resume for review so start to start as appropriate and that allows us to shift back so these are the different ways that you can use the your different options to change the connectivity between your tasks so play around with us see what makes the most sense again don't enter firm date unless that firm date is actually firm all righty now it occurs to me that the career fair is really a single event it's what I'm preparing for so while it's good to keep track of what's going on during that single event in fact I really should just have the date in here so I'm going to delete these subtasks I just highlighted them and hit the Delete key and then I'm going to change the duration to zero when you change the duration of something to zero it changes to a diamond it becomes a milestone event and now here we see that in fact this just is randomly assigning my event to ten 18 but perhaps the career fair is actually taking place on 10 16 or let's say 10 17 I can manually type that in but nothing happens hmm well nothing happened because this task is auto scheduled and I was trying to force it to happen sooner so I have to manually schedule that task to make it happen sooner so now 10 17 can go in here but I have an issue 10 17 is occurring too soon other tasks are not done in time for my 10 17 event so I need to come back and make some adjustments what can happen faster here well maybe I can do the resume in 3 days and we're fine now so that's the approach you want to put your milestones in and figure out the tasks that have to happen to complete that milestone and if the tasks aren't happening fast enough it tells you you need to focus some more energy in certain areas so that's your quick overview of two other quick things I wanted to show you if you double-click on a piece on a task you can see a lot of that information that we've been playing with on this screen can be summarized in one window I usually don't use this because you can usually access it from the window but if you want to this is going to list your dependencies if you have specific resource tracking that would go here I won't show you how to do that but it's a nice powerful tool in Microsoft Project if you want to use it it's not really necessary to do just a Gantt chart and there are additional things in here you can change finish note you can have other constraints so by default everything is scheduled as soon as it can you can switch things around so that they start as late as possible so the events occur right before the the prep there the thing that they are proceeding that might make sense I'm going to cancel this that might make sense for get professional attire so I'm going to double click on that one and change this to I don't have the option because it's a summary task so let's do the route review wardrobe and say we're going to do that one as late as possible and now you can see my wardrobe is all occurring over here and as things change that will adjust I haven't put a date in I've just said well let's just delay that activity without manually typing any dates in okay so the other thing I want to show you was your timeline so everything here I kept with the default timeline this bar up at the top if I double click it I can adjust the timeline right now it's defaulting to showing me to tears the top in this case was weeks and the bottom was days and that was appropriate for this particular project that I showed you before you're seeing a project for example that's going to be spanning many months so I recommend keep the two tiers but change the upper tier or rather the middle tier as its labeled change that to months and then change the label to make it more compact I don't need the full January written out Jan tells me plenty okay so I click OK we can see now I've just got the months listed here but then I've got all the days let's clean that up and go to the bottom tier instead of days we'll change it to weeks and again I want to keep the the week designation as simple as possible I like to just list the day that the Week starts on or the date rather so this is what my timeline will look like okay so everything on this project got scrunched up into a very short time scale before your senior project this is a good time scale all right that's your Gantt chart then if you want to print it you go to file print and this is what you're going to get printing out so you can see it's used my time scale but it expanded everything out to fit it onto the screen so you can still see where everything fits in here for this print I would probably change my time to go back so it's actually irrelevant information up at the top I like that you can see the duration to start the finish here I might hide these first couple of columns because they are necessary and that gives a little bit more room on the right so again this is something you can play with you can either print the whole project or you can choose specific dates by default it's landscape I recommend that you can probably play around with the header information here to minimize that so try some things out see what you can find all right good luck

Channel: Schuster Engineering

Views: 215,420

Keywords: Project 2013, Gantt, project management

Id: tIqb3ii9nOs

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2016