Viewing your Project Timeline (Gantt chart)

Struggling with getting a big picture of your project plan after scoping and planning your tasks? With Forecast's Project Timeline it is possible to review and schedule the work for individual projects within a Gantt chart. Here it is possible to assign tasks based on individuals availability, determine the resources needed to complete the work, and plan the order in which the tasks should be completed. 

For advice and best practices on how to use Gantt charts, see How to Make a Gantt Chart - A Complete Tutorial.

This article covers:

• Viewing your Timeline
• Customizing your Timeline view
• Managing the project on the Timeline
• Viewing the project team's allocations

Viewing your Timeline

Once the project has been scoped and tasks have been planned, all the scheduled work and the people involved will be visible in the project Timeline.

The Gantt chart is then divided into three main areas within the left sidebar which can be collapsed or expanded to view more data:

Project name: The name of the project alongside its ID are displayed here. Phases: In this section each individual phase that makes up the project is listed. These phases, also known as milestones, are defined during the scoping stage. By clicking on each phase, tasks and subtasks will appear nested underneath. Click on each task to open the task modal and view all the details for the planned deliverable. See Defining your project scope for more information on how to create phases.  Placeholders: A placeholder represents a resource demand on a project at the role level and can be used instead of allocating a person. This allows you to do high level planning without “blocking” your people's time on things you're not sure of yet. Later a placeholder can be confirmed or allocated to a specific team member. Project team: This section shows the team members that are assigned to the project. By expanding it, it will display an overview of the current allocation status for the team assigned to the project.

Customizing your Timeline view

• Heatmap in hours or percentages: Display the utilization of your team members on the heatmap in either percentages or hours by selecting one of these options from the dropdown menu.
• Show/Hide: Show/hide option allows to show or hide weekends in the timeline.
• Today button & change chart dates: Change the date by scrolling with the arrows to move forward and backwards in time. Click on the Today button to bring you back to today's date.
• Zoom in/out function: Zoom in and out with the + and - buttons to display your chart with day-by-day, week-by-week or month-by-month views.
• Search & filter: The search bar allows you to quickly find a task/ phase that you wish to locate on the timeline calendars, while with the filter function it is possible to apply a number of filters to narrow the view down to specific details. 

Managing the project on the Timeline

Within the timeline it is possible to manage directly the project tasks and phases dates and reassign without having to switch between tabs.

Managing a task or phase's start and end dates

Simply drag an entire phase, along with its task or single tasks within the calendar, in order to quickly and effortlessly change the start and end dates.

Create new tasks and/or phase

It is possible to create new tasks under a particular phase by simply dragging the mouse cursor across the dates you want the task to be placed. Once you do that a pop up will appear that will allow you to name the task, choose if you wish to create a task or a phase. 

Create dependencies between tasks

Viewing the project team's allocations

Under the Project team section it is possible to review the current allocations for the individuals that are part of the project.  The overview will look differently based on if the account setting is set to Task assignment or Project Allocation. See Selecting your resource management strategy for more information.

Task assignment view

If the account resource management setting is set to task assignment, the project team view will display the allocations to show if individuals are fully, partially or over allocated, together with any planned time off tracked in Forecast.

Project allocation view