Slide 46 of 61
Notes:
PERT and Gantt charting are frequently presented as mutually exclusive project management tools. But PERT and Gantt charting should not be considered as alternative project management approaches. All systems development projects have some intertask dependency, and all projects offer opportunities for task overlapping. Therefore, PERT and Gantt charts can be used in a complementary manner to plan, schedule, evaluate, and control systems development projects.
Fortunately, project management software allows the best feature of PERT -- namely, the critical path analysis -- to be incorporated into Gantt charts. As activities are entered, their duration and dependencies are entered. Gantt bars are scheduled to take into consideration the dependencies. Usually, the critical path is highlighted with boldfacing or color. Additionally, the amount of slack time in noncritical path activities is also highlighted. This can prove useful when deciding which activities to delay in order to get off-schedule activities back on track.
