Gantt Chart

A Gantt chart is a bar chart that represents a project schedule by plotting its individual tasks as horizontal bars against a timeline, with each bar's length and position showing when a task starts, how long it runs and when it finishes. The American mechanical engineer and management consultant Henry Gantt developed and popularized the chart in the 1910s, building on earlier scheduling-graph work by the Polish engineer Karol Adamiecki, as a tool for planning and tracking production schedules in factories, and Gantt's own charts were used to plan major industrial projects including construction of the Hoover Dam and the U.S. interstate highway system. The chart remains a standard tool of project management and industrial scheduling, since extended by software into the interactive, dependency-linked versions used across modern project-management systems.