Charting concepts and applications

Gantt chart is "a graphical representation of the duration of tasks against the progression of time"

A project is made up of a set of different tasks and for each task there is an allocated period of completion. For example, a programming project may have the following steps: planning, researching programming language, the actual programming phase, beta testing and final report and release.

In order to follow each of these tasks, a GANTT chart will have each task on the Y-axis and the total period of time in which the project is due, on the X-axis, broken down in units (days, months, etc.). Each task is represented by a horizontal bar, covering the time span. For example, the programming phase may take from 15th of January to 15th of April. After mapping each task on the chart, the horizontal bars are filled to evaluate how much of the project is completed. This way, by drawing a vertical line at a certain date, the report date, you will be able to evaluate how much of the work is completed on each task. The main disadvantage with Gantt charts is that they do not report "task dependencies"

and you are not able to evaluate how much your project is suffering because one task is not performed in time.

Flow Charting

Flow charts are used in "defining and analyzing processes"

. The typical flow chart is formed of different shapes, with strict significance, with text describing tasks in each of them and lines interconnecting them. The shapes are used to give a textual description of each step. Regularly, diamonds are sued for addressing questions, while rectangles are normal tasks. The diamonds start a decision making procedure in which the manager needs to decide different paths for each answer (for example, a question such as "does the budget address current issues" will create a YES and a NO path, each giving way to new actions to be taken in each case). The flow chart gives a basic overview of a process and the infrastructure related to basic decision points.

PERT Chart

A PERT chart is used to "schedule, organize, and coordinate tasks within a project"

. Basically, a PERT chart is formed from nodes, which represent significant events, and directional lines, representing specific tasks. The directional lines that are subsequent one to another are representing tasks that must be accomplished in that specific order and are dependent on one another. Tasks that are not interdependent are represented as parallel tasks. Additionally, there are specific tasks that are event dependent, in the sense that they do not share the same resources, but are subsequent one to another. The great advantage and improvement from the Gantt Chart is the fact that the PERT Chart clearly shows dependent tasks and it is easy to evaluate consequences on the entire project if a task is not done.

Pareto Chart

The Pareto Chart is somewhat similar to a bar char or to a histogram. It is used to evaluate the number of occurrences for certain events. It counts the number of times a problem happens and places the results in a bar chart, with the main differences that the frequency is represented in descending order.

Ishikawa (Cause - Effect) Diagram

The Ishikawa Diagram is used to identify and picture all causes that may have somehow (not necessarily directly) influenced a certain given effect. Additionally, the causes are hierarchically pictured to present their relative importance one to another. The effect is presented as a horizontal line, while the four main categories of causes are oblique lines deriving here from. The four categories vary from industry to industry, but, in administration and services, these are generally equipment, policies, procedures, and people. Instead of the fishbone diagram, one can similarly use a tree format, with the four main categories as initial branches. Following this, each category will have a list of causes, smaller bones or branches that have somehow influenced the resulted effect.