Construction Project Management
Planning & Scheduling
Bar Charts
Building a CPM Schedule
Networks & Logic
CPM Scheduling
Logic Relationships & Precedence Networks
Progress Updating

How to Best Use Bar Charts

There is an ideal way to use Gantt Charts to help you plan and manage construction work. Let Dr. Mubarak talk you through the best way to use Gantt Charts.

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All right. Welcome back. We're going to continue talking about bar charts. We defined them, we showed some examples, and we talked about advantages and disadvantages. Now, we're going to talk a little bit more of usage of bar charts and how to utilize them best.

Bar charts can be loaded, as we mentioned, with more information, such as one of my favorites is to show each activity with two bars. One bar shows the As Built and the other bar As Planned. The advantage of this chart is enormous...that you see on the same chart two bars. And it can tell you from looking at the positions of the bars and the length of the bars if the activity started on time or not, and if the activity finished on time or not. Sometimes the activity may start one day late. However, they catch up and they finish on time. So, it shows you one bar, how the base line says it should have started on this date and finished on that date. The other one, it showed you how it was built in reality.

The other use of bar charts is, this is in the base line, you can show also each activity with two bars. One represents the early dates, early start, early finish, the other one with late dates. Also this one gives you an idea about the criticality of each activity and how much float, if any, it has. You can plot the S-curve on the bar chart to show the cumulative and incremental budget, man hours,...

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