gantt chart

A wedding planner with three months to work with can hold the whole event in her head, more or less. Aso ebi by week two, caterer confirmed by week four, hall deposit before month end, and so on, she juggles it fine because there are maybe fifteen moving parts and a forgiving amount of time.

Now put her in charge of building a market complex in Alaba for a client who wants it ready in ten months, with bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, tilers, a generator installer, and a council inspector all needing to show up in the right order and not step on each other's work. Nobody holds that in their head. Try, and you will forget that the roofing team cannot start until the walls are done, or that the inspector needs three days notice.

This is exactly the gap a Gantt chart closes. It is a simple bar chart where the left side lists every task and the bottom shows time, in weeks or months. Each task gets a horizontal bar showing when it starts and when it ends, and bars often overlap or follow one another to show which jobs depend on which.

A software founder in Lagos building an app might use one to show that design finishes in week three, development runs weeks two to eight, testing starts week seven, and launch is week ten, with the bars making it obvious that testing cannot begin before development is far enough along.

In the United Kingdom, a small events company organising a conference for four hundred people might chart venue booking, speaker confirmations, ticket sales, and catering across four months, so that when a speaker cancels in month two, everyone can see instantly which other bars shift as a result.

The chart does not do the work. It just makes the shape of the work visible, which is often the difference between a project that finishes on time and one that calmly falls apart because two people assumed someone else had it handled.