• Table of contents
• Gantt Charts / Project Management
  • Basic Capstone How To Guides
  • Project Management Resources
    • Written Resources
    • Video Resources
  • Common problems students encounter and how to solve them:
  • Purpose
  • Terminology
    • Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
    • Milestone
    • Tasks
  • Planning Tool
  • Other Resources

Gantt Charts / Project Management¶

This page provides information and guidelines for project management and creating / using EDN's built-in Gantt Chart features.

It may be helpful to know that there are multiple stakeholders for your project management:

1. Team members
2. CE
3. PE
4. Client / mentors

---

Basic Capstone How To Guides¶

• Quick Start Guide
• Proper way to CLOSE an issue
• Reflecting on your New Project Plan
• Reviewing your Gantt Chart
• Creating SMART Goals
• Creating Versions (also called milestones)

Project Management Resources¶

For Capstone, we are not expecting that all of our students will eventually become project managers! We do expect, however, that many students will work within a project oriented job setting or that a future job setting might benefit from adopting project management techniques.

The resources below are intended primarily to expose you to the benefits and the language & terminology used in project management.

Written Resources¶

There are many articles on this topic - some for training purposes to help people become project managers or to further develop their skills, some to help explain why a company should have or employ project managers and some that are introductory.

The selection of resources listed here are intended only to help explain why applying project management is important.

• https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/why-is-project-management-important - good explanation of why project management is important. Don't worry about their focus on the project manager.
• https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/white-papers/value-of-project-management.pdf - The Project Management Institute is an industry wire resource. This article focuses on the importance of using project management
• https://thedigitalprojectmanager.com/why-is-project-management-important/ - good overview of the importance
• https://www.managementstudyhq.com/project-management.html
• File: 10 Reasons Why Projects Fail v2.pdf

Video Resources¶

There is no shortage of videos on project management. Some focus on the career path of a project manager, some focus on justifying why one is need and there are many tutorials and on-line courses about project management that are intended to help individuals learn these skills.

The video(s) below are intended to help you understand why project management is important and why we feel that students should develop some basic project management skills.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp7w5wdv9_Y - good introduction to why we need project management

Common problems students encounter and how to solve them:¶

• What do I do with old issues?

---

Purpose¶

The purpose of the Gantt chart is to facilitate a successful project. It is to help team members communicate among themselves to their project Client's and to their Chief and Project Engineers. It is NOT busy work to be done and then forgotten! It IS a living document that must be updated and maintained regularly, adding new items as they are identified and updating the status of existing items. It will show who is the owner of each task and when it is due / available so that others can plan their own work.

It is a tool for teams to help hold team members accountable for their work - in terms of quantity, timeliness and quality.

Terminology¶

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)¶

One of the first steps to project planning is to create a Work Breakdown Structure. This document Sample_WBS_by_Task_Types.pptx will show a sample WBS. We recommend that you do a brief web search for other examples and more information.

Milestone¶

These are the major deliverables of your project. EDN calls these "Versions". Be sure to use the SMART approach to naming / defining these! Milestones are reached by achieving a series of tasks (see below). Milestones represent an all or nothing measurement. Either your team has reached the milestone or they have not!

This website has some helpful information on understanding what makes a milestone: https://www.ittoolkit.com/how-to-it/projects/project-milestones.html

Tasks¶

These are the steps you must take to get from one milestone to another. Each task represents a measurable chunk of work. As a result, a team can measure it's progress toward a milestone by examining the individual tasks required to get there. EDN calls these 'Issues' and will automatically calculate the percentage of issues completed to reach a given milestone.

Be sure to use the SMART approach to naming / defining these!

---

Planning Tool¶

This file can be printed on 11x17 paper. It has rows for each team member's name and columns for several weeks. Each team member can then fill in what they plan to do for each week to contribute to the project. This can then be team reviewed and used to identify planning gaps and or overlap - Fill_In_Gantt_Chart-v4.xlsx.

Other Resources¶

The Project Management Institute has a large amount of information on their web site: https://pmiteach.org/

---

Attachments Below

---