Project Management: Foundations to Practice · Schedule Management and the Critical Path Method
Gantt Charts and Schedule Compression
When a deadline moves up, a project manager has exactly two structural levers to pull. This chapter covers both, and why applying either one to the wrong activity accomplishes nothing.
The Gantt chart, a horizontal bar chart showing activities against a timeline, was popularized by American engineer Henry Gantt in the early 1900s and remains the most recognizable visual format for project schedules [1]. Its longevity across more than a century of project management practice, surviving the transition from paper charts to sophisticated software, reflects how intuitively it maps onto how people naturally think about time and sequence.
Key Takeaways
- The Gantt chart, from the early 1900s, remains the dominant visual schedule format over a century later.
- Crashing adds resources to critical path activities to shorten duration, usually at additional cost and with diminishing returns.
- Fast tracking runs originally sequential activities in parallel, increasing risk by removing built-in sequential safety margin.
- Both techniques only shorten the project when applied to the critical path; applying them elsewhere provides zero schedule benefit.