Gantt Charts for Project Management
Gantt charts are an easy method to visualize to your users and stakeholders the timeline for development, implementation, maintenance, and evaluation of your system. An effective Gantt chart should include all of the different steps of creating your design through beta testing the finalized result.
An effective Gantt chart should show all the different steps for designing the geospatial design. The project proposal you’ve outlined in this term project is the “planning” stage of your GIS design. The next stage(s) are developing the design and evaluating the final version (which is an iterative process). Consider steps that a GIS analyst would implement including setting up the workstation, buying the appropriate licenses/computer hardware (if necessary), accessing and analyzing the data, conducting a needs assessment/cognitive walkthrough, developing the geospatial software (whether that includes from a low/no code option or from an open source may require more time/steps), performing the usability testing, beta testing, and maintenance. You may have many more steps for your project, considering the entire life cycle of developing a Geospatial Design.
There are several different methods for developing a Gantt chart.
From the website above (click “Gantt Chart in Excel”) for creating a Gantt chart in Excel, you can expect to create a Gantt chart as displayed below. However, your Gantt chart should have more specific details (e.g. instead of four tasks, you should have at least 10 – depending on the complexity of your project). You may also consider incorporating specific “quarters” for your development.
Gantt Chart in R programming Language
Using the detailed step-by-step explanation above, you can produce a much more customizable Gantt chart with the same data in the R programming language using ggplot and tidyverse. (Link Above: click “Gantt chart in R Programming Language”).
Below is an example of the Gantt chart you can create, which has different “stages” of design, specific dates, different tasks, and an additional detail of completed versus not yet done.
Depending on your fluency with python, you can create a Gantt chart using MatPlotLib (link above: Click “Gantt Charts in Python”), which offers similar customization as R including dates, project tasks, and additional details of completed/Not Yet Completed.
The example below shows different tasks broken down by “team”; however, you can easily break it down by “Completed” and “Not Yet Completed”. You can add additional details if you are comfortable with Python and/or interested in providing detail on your chart.
