Switch to the view you want to start with. On the More Views dialog box, click the view that you want to use in the Views list, and then click Apply.Īfter you start working with Project, if won’t be long before you get creative and start thinking about how to customize a view quickly and effectively. If you do not see the view that you want, on the Task Views group, click Gantt Chart, and then click More Views. In the Task Views group or Resource Views group, click the view that you want to use. You can assign to different tasks, see who is overallocated, and a number of other project management tasks-all in one view! Project management tip If you have assigned resources to tasks in your project schedule, get to know the Team Planner view.

The critical tasks have to be watched carefully, while the floating tasks can take longer without it mattering.Choose the right view to see information on Gantt chart bars, on a calendar, on a timeline, or on spreadsheet-like tables. Ideally the critical tasks would be shown in red, like this. So, going back to the Gantt chart, with the cross links making the total time for the project longer, there is in fact a hidden critical path, which probably jumps between departments, which really defines how long the project has to take – like this: Jumping straight to the Gantt, as encouraged by MS Project, makes it very hard to work out where the cross links go, and in fact they are usually ignored or forgotten, thus affecting the critical path, giving an incorrect total estimate of the time for the project, and meaning we don’t know which tasks are critical These critical tasks were totally missed on the original simplistic-and-wrong diagram!Īnd the best way to work all this out is by doing the post-its first. So here are the critical tasks, the ones you really need to focus on, shown in red Which leads to this critical (longest) path: The diagram is much more likely to look like this, if drawn correctly:Īnd since we don’t want arrows going backwards we need to spread it out a bit so it looks like this: … is is bound to be WRONG there are always crosslinks between the departments. You could say that if you were showing this project plan as dependencies using post-its, the project is being planned wrongly like this: They forget that actually some of the tasks might be held up waiting for the other departments:īasically there are bound to be some cross-connections, for example like this: So they have several linear paths, all in parallel. Usually when people are doing this they make a mini-Gantt for each department, and then combine them all, like this: Microsoft Project encourages you to jump straight to the Gantt chart, without bothering with post-it notes and critical paths first. Measure your Happiness Score with the Happiness Lemon!.Happiness course via hybrid/blended learning.Chris has been translated into 14 languages:.

Gantt chart not showing in ms project