Introduction
Project managers often struggle to effectively monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions. Fortunately, project management charts offer a powerful solution to these challenges. Project management charts are valuable tools for navigating project managers through complex projects.
These data visualization tools provide project managers with insightful information about projects through charts and help steer projects in the right direction while ensuring better quality deliverables.
There are many charts you can use in the project management. Here is the list of popular project management charts:
- Gantt chart
- PERT chart (Program Evaluation Review Technique)
- CPM chart (Critical Path Method)
- Kanban board
- Burndown chart
- Milestone chart
- Fishbone diagram (Ishikawa diagram)
- Timeline chart
- Radar chart
- Histogram
- Scatter plot
- Flowchart
- Pie chart
- Bar chart
- Radar chart
- Waterfall chart
- Radar chart
- Bubble chart
- Radar chart
- Tree diagram
Now, before diving into the details. Let’s cover the basics first.
What is a project management chart?
A project management chart is a visual tool used to display important project information in a clear and organized manner. It helps project managers understand tasks, timelines, and resource allocation easily. The most notable thing about charts used in project management is that they make it easier to understand complex project data.
There are several types of charts that project managers use to analyze and monitor different aspects of their projects. While some project management charts like Gantt charts are used extensively, others like Pareto and control charts have limited usage.
Why project management charts are important?
For simple and small projects, there is a limited set of data that you need to observe throughout their life cycles. However, as the complexity of the projects swings up, you need to keep track of more and more data. This is where project management charts can be of great help.
The biggest advantage of using project management charts is that they allow you to analyze and extract useful project information without hassle. These charts arrange data systematically and make it easier for you to evaluate project data.
Here are some key benefits of project management charts that you will find interesting:
- Eliminate the need for moving back and forth to collect project data and thus, save a lot of time
- Help you to stay updated about what’s happening with the project
- Promote collaboration among team members
- Allow you to have better clarity and understanding of the project
- Project tracking becomes simple and effective
- Assist in making better changes to the project plan and cope with unexpected issues
Before moving further, I want to clarify that these benefits are common among most project management charts. However, you need to know that every project management chart has benefits that suit a particular situation or project.
11 Most important project management chart types
Hopefully, you have developed a good understanding of how different charts used in project management allow you to manage your projects smartly. Now, it’s time to get familiar with the project management charts that are highly popular among managers, so instead of listing all the charts, we have mentioned 11 charts that you will be using as a project manager:
1. Gantt chart
Gantt charts are undoubtedly the most prominent project management charts that modern businesses and managers use to control their projects. A Gantt chart provides you with a timeline view of your projects. It allows you to visualize how different tasks/activities of a project are connected and how they fit into the project timeline.
A Gantt chart is a variation of the bar chart and is quite easy to interpret. The vertical axis of a Gantt chart represents the project’s tasks while the horizontal axis represents the time duration.
At present, many leading online project management software like ProofHub offer interactive Gantt charts to help you stay on top of all your projects.
The best thing about online Gantt chart tools is that they are easy to use and allow team collaboration. By using online Gantt charts, you can plan projects, schedule and assign tasks, set task dependencies, associate project milestones with tasks, and track progress. Additionally, you can identify the critical path of a project, which lets you estimate the project duration.
Gantt charts provide a subtle way of organizing all the essential project data in one place and increasing team productivity. Moreover, you can use these charts to manage your projects using the critical path method (CPM).
You can manage all your projects effectively using ProofHub’s interactive Gantt charts. Sign up to try them for free!
2. PERT chart
The PERT chart is another popular project management chart commonly used for scheduling, controlling, and monitoring project tasks. The PERT acronym for Program Evaluation and Review Technique is one of the most popular project management methodologies used in various industries.
A PERT chart represents the activities and milestones of a project in the form of a network diagram. Interestingly, the PERT and CPM methods have many similarities and both these methods are sometimes used simultaneously to manage projects.
The most significant difference between the two techniques is that CPM is suitable for managing project activities having certain time durations, whereas PERT is best for managing activities with uncertain time durations.
A PERT chart includes circles and arrows. The circles depict the project activities and the arrows represent the progression among the activities. With a PERT chart, you can identify both the critical and non-critical activities of a project. Additionally, the chart also provides information about parallel activities that you can undertake at the same time to speed up project development without putting excess pressure on the resources.
You may find PERT charts a little complex when using them for the first time. However, it will not take much time for you to understand them and leverage their power to organize projects constructively.
3. Kanban Boards
Kanban board is a project management tool to visualize and optimize your workflow. The board consists of columns representing different workflow stages, each column contains cards representing individual tasks. These cards mostly move from left to right across the board as work progresses through the different stages.
Kanban boards are widely used because of their simplicity, flexibility, and focus on continuous improvement. It provides a clear and visual representation of work in progress, allowing team members to easily understand what tasks are being worked on, their current status, and what needs to be done next.
Kanban boards are a good project management chart as they can help managers visualize the progress of various tasks, identifying bottlenecks and progress accordingly.
You can try ProofHub’s Kanban for project management. Sign up for free here
4. Work breakdown structure (WBS)
The work breakdown structure is an organized way of dividing a project into smaller manageable sections. In general, the WBS chart has a level 1 which contains the main tasks. The tasks at Level 1 are then divided into sub-tasks and listed in the downward direction.
While the WBS has no stats or figures to display, it certainly is useful in simplifying the way you manage projects. It allows you to execute a project systematically and ensure proper resource allocation.
Work breakdown structure offers a practical way of simplifying a complex project by breaking it into several tasks and subtasks. By breaking down the project and creating a task hierarchy, you will be able to formulate a better project plan, schedule and assign work, and ensure that project work gets executed systematically.
One thing that’s missing in this project management chart is that you cannot define the dependencies among the tasks and it is not possible to visualize the timeline of the project.
5. Flowchart
Projects that have several processes and have a complex flow of activities are difficult to manage. A flowchart is the best solution to simplify such types of projects and make your life easier when you are dealing with complicated projects.
For those of you who don’t know already, a flowchart is a graphical representation of the project workflow. It includes all the activities and processes that happen between the start and the end of the project. Boxes and figures of different shapes along with arrows are used to illustrate the sequence of events and the way they are connected.
Flowcharts are a great way to define the logic that your projects will use and share it with other people who can be your team members, clients, stakeholders, etc. A flowchart provides a clear idea about the objectives of the project and also gives an overview of what will happen during the different project events and phases.
As a manager, you should know that flowcharts are highly effective when used for small projects. However, creating flowcharts for large projects that have too many processes and sequences is not feasible. For large-scale projects, flowcharts are used in combination with Gantt charts for better project management.
6. Cause-effect chart
One of the key responsibilities of project managers in almost all organizations is problem-solving. As soon as a problem or issue arises during the project development, managers have to figure out the causes of the problem and take corrective actions to eliminate it.
The cause-effect chart allows managers to highlight all the potential causes that give rise to a particular problem. In general, the chart contains information about various causes and their effects that can lead to problems in a project. While creating a cause-effect chart, you must include all the potential causes of an issue otherwise, it will become difficult to resolve the problem during the actual project development.
Cause and effect charts are also known as Ishikawa diagrams or fishbone diagrams. The latter name is because these charts look somewhat similar to fish endoskeletons.
Managers from different industries prefer using cause-and-effect charts to resolve problems in their projects. One main reason behind the significant popularity of cause and effect charts is that they are easy to understand. You can use them to perform a comprehensive analysis of the problems occurring in your projects and develop feasible solutions without wasting much of your time and effort.
Apart from problem-solving, you can also use cause and effect charts to conduct brainstorming sessions that can yield innovative ideas and solutions.
7. Pareto chart
The next chart on this list of popular project management charts is the Pareto chart. Project managers use this type of chart when they need more information about their project than what a typical graph has to offer.
A Pareto chart is a combination of a bar graph and a line graph. By using this chart, you can highlight some specific factors of your project. Typically, Pareto charts are used for the identification of problems and complications in a project. It helps you to identify the most common reasons for the occurrence of a problem and thus you can take appropriate actions to eradicate the problem.
Pareto charts provide you with vital information about your projects that you can use to make better decisions. Additionally, these charts are suitable to use for almost all project management methodologies and are of great aid while performing Six Sigma analysis.
8. Bar chart
Bar charts are very common in project management because they are simple, versatile, and easy to interpret. In project management, these charts are used for visualizing a wide variety of project data ranging from the billable & non-billable work hours to the number of completed & pending tasks.
A typical bar chart has two axes with one axis depicting the different categories to be compared and the other axis representing the parameter of comparison. Although the bars can be plotted both horizontally and vertically, the horizontal bar charts are more popular.
While you are managing a project, you may need to visualize some data like how your team is distributing their work hours across different projects. Bar charts allow you to quickly access important information about your project.
Almost all the leading project management software employs bar charts to visualize some part of the project data. The software automatically creates and modifies bar charts as the project progresses and new project activities occur.
9. Pie Chart
Pie charts are also very simple and quite popular in project management. Just like bar charts, they are flexible and can represent different types of project data. These charts are circular and act as an ideal tool for data segmentation.
The main purpose of using a pie chart is to illustrate the numeric proportions of different categories that form a collective whole. This type of chart is among the most basic data visualization tools that you can use for managing projects for all levels of complexity.
While Pie charts may seem perfect to use under any conditions, there’s one particular limitation that restricts its usage. These charts are specifically good for displaying proportions of a limited number of categories, preferably less than 10. When the number of categories becomes too large, the pie chart becomes cluttered, and it becomes difficult to understand the proportions just having a mere look.
If you want to use pie charts for your projects, then you can find them integrated into the best online project management tools & software. Also, you will be able to leverage the power of modern pie charts to understand your project data with ease.
10. Burn-up Chart
Tracking progress is quite essential to assess whether the project will be completed on time or not. A burn-up chart makes it easier for you to monitor project progress and also provides information about the pending work.
By using a burn-up chart, you will be able to visualize the total amount of work and the completed work altogether. Usually, the vertical axis of the chart depicts the number of tasks or amount of work, whereas the horizontal axis represents the time duration which may be in hours, days, or weeks.
As a manager, you will find burn-up charts extremely useful for assessing the speed at which the work is being executed. Furthermore, the data will help you to make adjustments to your project plan and make it more effective.
There are two key benefits of burn-up charts: they help you to determine if the project development is going at the right speed, and they can easily accommodate any changes in the project scope. The latter means that if there is an addition of new work or tasks in a project, it can be included in the burn-up chart without any trouble.
Although burn-up charts are not available across many project management tools, there are certain software, like ProofHub, that lets you create interactive burn-up charts for your projects almost instantaneously.
11. Control Chart
If you want to monitor a certain project process, control charts are the best way to do it. This type of project management chart is popular for observing any erratic change in the process behavior, which makes it possible to identify problems at the early stages.
Control charts offer a reliable way of determining the stability of a process. By ensuring the stability of various project processes, you can make sure that the project executes as smoothly as possible while facing minimum hindrances.
A control chart is more like a graph having an upper control limit, a lower control limit, and a centerline or average process output. The process behavior is considered fine as long as the graph line remains in between the upper control limit and the lower control limit. If the graph line touches or crosses the market control limits, it means that the process behavior has become undesirable.
ProofHub integrates different types of project management charts to help you deliver projects on time. Start your free trial now!
Summing it up
Project management charts can help you to manage different phases of project development systematically. The information provided by these charts is easy to comprehend and is of great help for finishing projects successfully.
As a manager, you can use different types of project charts according to your personal preference and make your life easier. The charts discussed in this article are highly popular among managers to improve the quality of their project work and ensure timely delivery.
