Project Management - How to Create a Gantt Chart & PERT

This course is a result of 25 years of consulting project and portfolio management experience, including managing all aspect of project scheduling and building Gantt charts. We will start this course with a brief overview of activities, tasks and Gantt charts and how they are used in the project management domain. We will then focus on how to obtain or build an activities list including such sources as templates, work breakdown structures, experience, statements of work, joint sessions and validations by team members and/or vendors.

Also, we will discuss several activity duration estimation techniques, both formal and hands-on including expert judgement, bottom-up estimates, top-down estimates, experience, team input historical data and PERT.

We will also examine PERT methodology, applicable formulas and calculation of PERT estimates for a specific task.

The main section of this course is dedicated to the step-by-step analysis of the creation of a Gantt chart on a real project. We will discuss the creation of the initial draft, followed by the transformations it underwent after in-depth discussion with both internal and vendor teams.

Finally, we will come back to the PERT methodology and learn how to generate estimates for the entire project based on its critical path.