Project planning with Gantt chart | Free template

Project planning with Gantt chart is a free template to plan when activities in a project should be started and finished. A project is a series of tasks or activities to be implemented to achieve an outcome, such as the development of a product, the construction of a house or the implementation of a marketing campaign.

Projects can be very complex and extend over several years from start to completion with lots of tasks to be completed. Projects can also be simple and short.

Projects typically are managed and controlled in three phases:
1. Planning: This phase involves setting goals for the project, to define the project and to create a project organization.
2. Scheduling: This phase involves identifying the activities to be undertaken and to allocate resources to activities, these resources can be people, capital, equipment and materials.
3. Control: this step is to control and monitor resources, costs, quality, time and more. This control may mean changes in previously established plans.

This template for project planning can be used for a project when the activities to be undertaken in the project must be identified and when the timing of these activities is to be made. Activities in a project are often not independent of each other but for some of the activities to be implemented it may require that one or more activities already have been completed. An activity may therefore have several precedence’s, in this template for project planning with Gantt chart there can be 4 different precedence defined for each activity.

Each activity in the project shall be ordered so that the activities that must be started first also should be first in the list of activities. When the activities are detected you enter these in the template and specify the time it takes to complete each activity.

In this template there are calculations for when a certain activity can begin at the earliest, when an activity at the earliest can be completed, when an activity can start at the latest without jeopardizing the project and when an activity should be completed at the latest without endangering the whole project period. In this template “Slack" are also calculated which is the time that an activity can be delayed without putting the project in jeopardy. Activities that have no "Slack time" are critical and can´t be delayed without putting the project in jeopardy. Critical activities are said to constitute the critical path and this is the series of activities that determines the total project duration.

This template displays all activities in a Gantt chart in order to make it easy to grasp when the activities is to be implemented in time. You can use this template to plan activities and time in a project. Updated: 01/01/2015 | Created by All-templates.biz

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Tags: project management resource planning scheduling