Managing multiple projects at once can make even the most organized project manager’s head spin. Things get even more complicated when you have resources working on more than one project in different roles.
Gantt charts come in handy for managing multiple projects at once, particularly for those that are mired in more dependencies and projects within projects typical of construction and design. There’s a reason Gantt charts have held strong as a popular planning tool for well over 100 years.
Just one Gantt chart can provide substantial advantages as a single source of truth for multiple projects versus a more segregated, compartmentalized planning.
If you take it down to a single Gantt chart, you can get all important project data in a unified view and make changes to workflows directly.
In this article, we’ll talk about why you should consider using a singular Gantt chart to manage concurrent projects in the interest of efficiency, team morale, and more.
A more holistic view of the project landscape
As they say, don’t take the forest for the trees. A single Gantt chart offers a more holistic, more comprehensive overview of multiple projects, which can help project managers gain valuable insights from a broader project landscape.
By consolidating various projects into a singular visual representation with real-time data, you can more easily:
- Identify task dependencies and prioritize workloads: A Gantt chart clearly visualizes the sequence of tasks and their dependencies, helping managers identify critical path activities and allocate resources effectively. If you use just one, you can get a better idea of what tasks need to be prioritized and which workflows are running smoothly.
- Optimize resource allocation: By analyzing resource allocation across multiple projects, managers can identify potential bottlenecks and adjust assignments to ensure optimal utilization. A singular Gantt chart particularly comes in handy when resources are working across multiple projects. With some project management tools, you can elect to see the capacity data within the Gantt chart itself, alerting you immediately if someone is in danger of overload.
- Better collaboration and communication: A shared Gantt chart will work as a central hub for project teams, the single source of truth. This helps encourage real-time collaboration, plus overall transparency and accountability. Everyone gets directed to the same place for project info, which again, this is especially helpful when team members are wearing multiple hats.
- Mitigate risks proactively: By identifying potential risks and dependencies across projects, managers can develop better proactive risk mitigation strategies. While these may be different for different projects, seeing your risk management at play across the board in one place can give a better idea of whether or not your strategies are working.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions: The Gantt chart provides valuable data for analyzing project performance, identifying opportunities for optimization, and making informed decisions. The benefit of having just one is that you can more easily make decisions that could impact other projects by seeing how these decisions could possibly play out holistically with AI. If your Gantt chart is part of a larger project management tool, you can leverage this predictive analysis to help monitor time and budget spend.
Perfect for professional services
Let's explore some real-world scenarios where a single Gantt chart can be used to help unify, consolidate, and organize decision making around multiple projects:
- Marketing Campaigns: A marketing team managing multiple campaigns can use a single Gantt chart to track deadlines, allocate resources, and monitor the progress of each campaign. This gives a better idea of the overall health of all the campaigns (and the business’ strategies) without having to dive into siloed documentation.
- Software Development: Software development teams can use a single Gantt chart to visualize the development process, identify dependencies, and manage releases across various projects. For companies that work on lots of projects at once, they can get better insight into capacity and resource allocation, avoiding delays in the timeline before they get a chance to happen. This can also help prevent burnout among IT professionals who often put in long hours on just a single feature.
- Construction Projects: Construction project managers who are working on multiple projects are particularly good candidates for the single-chart method. Use just one Gantt chart to coordinate various tasks, such as site preparation, foundation work, and interior finishes. This will be especially helpful when you work with the same vendors across the board, as you’ll be able to better anticipate if/when one project will also be affected by a shortage, delay, etc.
- Event Planning: Event planners are known to be diehard Gantt chart users, but using just one offers better efficiency for growing businesses. You can easily use a Gantt chart to plan and coordinate various aspects of an event, including venue booking, catering, and entertainment. But using just one can help event planners account for dependencies that will affect other events, like when venues are unavailable, for instance.
Tips for using the single Gantt chart method
As the project management world continues to evolve with more efficient processes, courtesy largely of AI, the single Gantt chart method is now a go-to tool for managing multiple complex projects at once.
No jumping around or incorporating different project charts is necessary to understand, almost instantaneously, the current health of your projects.
The single Gantt chart method helps project managers improve efficiency, enhance collaboration, and deliver successful projects, all while keeping their wits about them when inevitable chaos strikes.
If you want to try using just one Gantt chart, here are a few tips:
- Choose the Right Tool: Select a project management tool that offers robust Gantt chart capabilities, like PSOhub, Asana, or Trello. The one Gantt chart method isn’t conducive to old-school sticky notes or siloed spreadsheets because it needs to be fed with real-time data.
- Customize Your Chart: Tailor the Gantt chart to your specific needs and aesthetic by customizing colors, fonts, and formatting.
- Regularly Update and Review: Keep your Gantt chart up-to-date and regularly review it to identify potential issues and adjust plans as needed. If you’re using a project management tool and not a siloed Gantt chart, say in Excel or Google Sheets, it will automatically update when any changes to project data are made.
- Automate your workflows: Wherever possible, automate your workflows within your project management software. Changes will automatically get reflected on the Gantt chart to minimize the need for manual updating.
- Collaborate Effectively: Encourage team members to contribute to the Gantt chart and provide regular updates on their progress. Usually, it’s best to collaborate at the task level to keep information streamlined. You should also consider integrating your Gantt chart software with Slack if that’s what your teams like to use.
One chart to rule them all
By leveraging a single Gantt chart to manage multiple projects at once, project managers can streamline workflows and improve overall efficiency, not to mention sleep better at night with a more holistic understanding of project status.
Importantly, one Gantt chart can level-up risk management strategies when common dependencies can affect the outcome in use cases like large construction projects. This powerful way of using one of project management’s most beloved tools can offer substantial benefits to segmented planning.
Remember that to use the single Gantt chart method, you have to rely on a project management tool that syncs with live project data. Using a siloed Gantt chart is not recommended and would actually make the method more complicated than using multiple charts.
PSOhub’s Gantt chart planning syncs with your calendar, time tracking data, contracts, and invoicing, making it one of the best platforms ever for the one Gantt chart method.
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