Five jobs, ten days, one deadline
The club treasurer needs a clean report by the end of the second week. It is Monday. The data is a mess.
You can not do everything at once. Some jobs must wait for others. How do you see all of that on one page?
Key words
| Word | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Gantt chart | a chart with one bar for each task, drawn along a line of time | |
| Task | one job in a plan | check the data |
| Duration | how long a task takes | 3 days |
| Dependency | a link that says one task can not start until another ends | |
| Deadline | the day the work must be finished | |
| Buffer | spare time kept in case something goes wrong |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can draw a Gantt chart for a data job, show which tasks depend on others, and work out if it meets a deadline.
Starter
Have a go
Starter
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
This is practice
Important
The real task comes from the exam board. This lesson uses an invented organisation and its own made-up data. Your teacher tells you how the real tasks are set and what you may bring.
What a Gantt chart shows
A Gantt chart shows every task as a bar. The bar starts when the task starts. Its length is the duration.
Look at the chart and you see three things at once: the order of the tasks, how long each one takes, and which ones overlap.
Run it: work out the days
tasks = [["Collect the files", 2], ["Check the data", 3], ["Fix the faults", 2], ["Test the fixes", 1], ["Build the report", 2]]
day = 1
for task in tasks:
end = day + task[1] - 1
print(task[0], "runs from day", day, "to day", end)
day = end + 1Worked example: the same plan in numbers
| Task | Duration | Starts after | Start day | End day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collect the branch files | 2 days | Nothing | Day 1 | Day 2 |
| Check the data | 3 days | Collect | Day 3 | Day 5 |
| Fix the faults | 2 days | Check | Day 6 | Day 7 |
| Test the fixes | 1 day | Fix | Day 8 | Day 8 |
| Build the report | 2 days | Test | Day 9 | Day 10 |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.