The Gantt

The Schedule view is the Gantt chart — tasks as bars along a timeline, with the dependencies drawn between them.

It is the only view that answers “when will we be finished?”, because it is the only one that understands what depends on what.

Reading it

Each task is a bar: its position is when it happens, its length is how long it takes. Lines between bars are dependencies.

Working left to right along the linked bars shows you the chain that determines the finish date.

The weather row

Above the bars, in the weekly view, is a row of forecast icons — one per day for the next week or so. Hover any of them for the detail: what it will do, the temperature range, the chance of rain, how much, and the wind when it is strong enough to matter.

A day the forecast expects to be wet is shaded yellow. That means a 50% or better chance of rain, or 5mm or more — roughly the point at which a pour or a roof gets moved. It is a warning, not a rule: nothing on the schedule changes and no date moves.

The forecast is for the site. It comes from the project’s postcode, set under Edit Project — or, for an older project that has not been re-saved since, from a suburb or postcode in its address lines. Two things follow from that:

• A project with no suburb or postcode gets no icons, and the row says so. Add them under Edit Project and the forecast follows the site.
• The row only appears in the weekly view. Monthly day columns are a few pixels wide, which is not enough for an icon to mean anything.

Days beyond the forecast simply have no icon. That gap is the honest answer — a ten-day outlook does not exist yet.

The critical path

The critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks through the job. Every task on it directly determines the completion date: delay one by a day and the job finishes a day later.

Tasks off the critical path have float — slack before they start affecting anything.

This is the most useful single idea in scheduling, because it tells you where to spend your attention.

Worked example

From the extension schedule, after frame inspection two chains run in parallel:

Chain	Tasks	Total
A	Roof trusses (2) → Roof tiles (3, +1 lag) → Windows (2) → Cladding (5)	13 d
B	Plumbing rough-in (3) → Insulation (1) → Plasterboard (5)	9 d

Chain A is critical. Chain B has four days of float.

So if the plumber is two days late, it costs nothing — there is float. If the roof tiler is two days late, the job finishes two days later.

That tells you exactly who to ring on Monday morning, and it is not obvious from a task list.

Chase the critical path, not the loudest problem

The trade making the most noise is rarely the one determining your finish date. Look at the Gantt before deciding what to chase.

Planned against actual

With Actual Start Date and Actual Finish Date filled in, the Gantt shows what was planned against what happened.

Slippage becomes visible as a pattern rather than a series of individual excuses. Three trades in a row starting two days late is not three unrelated problems — it is a schedule that was optimistic from the slab onwards.

Adjusting

Drag a bar to move a task, or change its duration. Anything depending on it follows.

That is the whole reason to work here rather than in the Calendar. Moving a date in the calendar changes one task; moving it here moves everything that depends on it, which is what actually happens on site.

When something slips

1. Update the task that slipped — actual dates, or a longer duration.
2. Let the schedule reflow.
3. Look at the new finish date.
4. If it has moved and that matters, look at the critical path for where to recover time.
5. Tell the client if the completion date has moved.

Step five is not optional on a contract with a completion date. A client told at the time is managing an expectation; one told at the end is being presented with a fact.

Recovering time

Only two things shorten a job, and both apply to the critical path:

• Shorten a task — more people, longer days, a different method.
• Overlap tasks — start something before its predecessor fully finishes, where it is safe to.

Shortening a task with float achieves nothing at all. This is the most common wasted effort in running a programme.

Printing and sharing

The Gantt exports for sharing with clients and subcontractors.

For a client, a summary-level chart is usually right — they want the shape and the finish date, not sixty bars. Collapse to parent tasks before exporting.