The Program Evaluation and Review Technique, commonly abbreviated to PERT, is a model for project management developed by the United States Department of Defense's US Navy Special Projects Office in 1958 as part of the Polaris mobile submarine-launched ballistic missile project.

Activity Sequence: the order in which you must schedule the activities.

Activity Logic: the logical relationship between activities.

Using this technique can reveal valuable information that you may otherwise overlook. It will help you understand the dependencies in your project, timescale, and workflow. Project managers can use this tool to identify the milestones and critical path of a project. You can add the time each activity will take to calculate the project duration. It shows which activity logically precedes or follows another activity.

Task Relationship: the relationships and dependencies between the tasks show when each task is due to begin and end.Ī Logic Network indicates the sequence of activities in a project over time.

Key Milestone: completion of a key phase or stage.

Estimated Time: the amount of time in days, weeks or months we expect a task or activity to take.

Event Group: a logical grouping of tasks that form a single-phase or stage.

In the diagram below, we see these elements: One of the Gantt charts first uses happened on America's Hoover Dam project started in 1931. They provide an excellent visual display of the entire project. They are an essential project management tool used for showing the phases, tasks, milestones and resources needed as part of a project.

Since their first introduction, Gantt charts have become an industry standard.

Since then, tracking time and interdependencies between tasks have become common and is now in everyday use. When first developed by Henry Gantt in 1917, the Gantt chart did not show the relationships between tasks. Gantt ChartĪ Gantt chart is a well-known and commonly used project management bar chart that tracks tasks across time. What follows is a short definition for each. A Gantt chart, Logic Network, PERT chart, Product Breakdown Structure and Work Breakdown Structure are standard tools used in project planning.

Project planning tools