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Photo 1. “Pandora’s Box” by Charles Edward Perugini, Wikipedia 

You might have heard about Pandora’s box: An artifact from ancient Greek mythology which was believed to contain all the evils of the world, of all released when Pandora opened it; the only thing left inside is “hope”. It’s used as a metaphor today which brings great troubles but also holds hope. (1) 

 As I was making contributions on a collaborative article at LinkedIn (2), I realized its analogue connection with one of the important tools we use as project management practitioners: Gannt chart.

Photo 2. Gannt chart example (Photo taken from TechTarget) 

It’s a valuable visual tool we use at schedule management everyday at our projects in every industry. However, like every other tool, it has its own pros and cons.

Despite its positive value, Gannt chart often disregards an important fact: predecessor-successor relations between project activities.  Following up a simple Gannt chart in order to monitor your project, you might have released all those troubles out of your Pandora’s box and hope might not be enough to present product of your project to your customer on time (neither in budget most probably). 

A Gannt chart shall be reinforced with Critical Path Method (CPM) feature to succeed at your project, if you don’t have activities following each other step by step just like in waterfall. For a project with a few activities, CPM can be applied manually however if you ask to practitioners, you would get the response that there are many activities at a project where manual calculations would work. On the other hand, if you have project activities with unclear time estimations, CPM will not offer you appropriate monitoring capabilities, therefore you need a PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) analysis feature embedded into your Gannt chart. Here you can’t calculate manually all  At the other end of the spectrum, I haven’t used Monte Carlo analysis for any of my projects, therefore I leave comments to readers of this blog. Moreover, if you would have a Gannt chart enriched with Earned Value Management feature, you will find yourself lucky enough to monitor project both on cost and schedule aspects. 

Eventually, a simple Gannt chart would not be enough, you will need a tailored method for monitoring and control for your project. It’s either a conventional software package you need to use, or an application that you might generate through Citizen Developer (4) effort using PMI’s Citizen Development Canvas, you need to enrich your Gannt chart with aforementioned features. 

Good luck on your next project, either you profit by Gannt chart as a treasure chest or you only have hope in hand out of your Pandora’s box to achieve final product.