Hi, this is Jason with TeamGantt.
There a few things you should do to make
your plan easy to understand for everyone involved.
Here are eight best practices you
need to know when building your Gantt chart to make sure it
will be as useful as possible.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Creating groups of tasks will make your plan easier to read
and will allow your readers to see what tasks are part
of a deliverable or a phase.
The more detail you can spell out when it comes to tasks,
the better you'll be able to track your progress and steps
leading up to a deliverable.
Refer back to your work breakdown structure,
and list the steps you used to create that.
Identifying who is responsible for each task
will help your readers to easily seek out their own tasks.
When creating a task, you can easily
put the team name or an acronym in front of the task.
You'll also want to take that a step further and assign
a responsible person for each task.
This will help you with resource planning and accountability.
Here, we used PT for Product Team and GM for Gantt Museum.
It seems like a silly tip, but it's
easy to hide this information in some applications.
If you're using TeamGantt, you'll
see the dates in the Gantt view.
Regardless of what tool you're using,
you want to make it clear not only when a task ends, but also
when it starts.
Again, this will help keep your team and clients accountable.
Now's your chance to block time off in your plan.
This is important now, because as soon
as your timeline shifts-- and you know it will,
so don't fight it-- you open yourself up to making an error
and dropping a deadline on a date that should be blocked.
If you note them in your plan, that won't happen.
If you're not going to move forward on the project
without an approval or one task must be done before another,
now is your chance to note it.
Not every planning tool offers dependency functionality,
and it can be a huge help.
As your plan shifts, the flow of the work will stay intact.
Just a note here-- we don't just make great project management
content like this at TeamGantt.
We also make web-based project management software
used by thousands of teams in over 60 countries.
With TeamGantt, you can tackle all these best practices
and much more.
For a free 30-day trial of TeamGantt,
go to teamgantt.com/signup.
Sometimes our team and clients forget what they committed to,
or maybe they don't fully understand the intent
of a task or a group.
Use the Notes section of your plan,
which most good Gantt software should
provide, to spell things out.
If you're lucky enough to use a product that
shows you overall team availability,
you better use it.
Knowing how your team is booked and what
projects they are a part of will play a huge role in how on-time
your project will be.
Having an overall view of their time
available and conflicting work will
help you to adjust your plan to either meet
the needs of existing project work
or shift the milestones you've put in your plan.
Creating a project plan is just like writing an article,
creating a design, or building a bike.
You want to be sure you get it right before it's read, viewed,
or used.
If you deliver a plan that has a mistake, misinterprets a task,
or even misses a date, you could end up looking bad.
People can lose faith in project managers
pretty easily sometimes, so you need
to be diligent about the quality of your work.
Grab a teammate, and ask them to review the plan with you
before you post it for review.
Of course, you'll also want to be
ready to get some feedback on your plan.
Formalizing a plan means that you're taking a set of ideas
and expanding on them.
That also means you might interpret something differently
than a teammate.
That's OK.
If you set up your plan using the guidelines in this video,
you'll have an easy time of managing and updating.
This was just a brief excerpt from TeamGantt's Guide
to Project Planning, written by project management
consultant, Brett Harned.
Brett focuses on solving issues that
are important to organizations who
want to produce quality digital projects in harmony.
Click the link in the description
to download the full guide for free,
so you can plan your projects more efficiently than ever.
And if you like this video and want to see more,
don't forget to click the Like button,
and subscribe to our channel.
Thanks.
See you next time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]