Gantt planning

Gantt planning
for multi-project setups

Drawing a Gantt chart is easy. Keeping it current while twenty other projects compete for the same design engineers and fitters is the actual job. Linetrack puts the bar chart on a cross-project data foundation – so every shift is also a statement about resources.

Linetrack Gantt planning across several parallel industrial projects

In short

A Gantt chart maps a project's tasks as bars along a timeline, making duration, sequence and dependencies visible. It only becomes a reliable plan once resources and parallel projects sit behind it. In Linetrack the bar chart is the surface of a cross-project data foundation: move one task and you immediately see which departments and which other projects it hits.

400+

Excel spreadsheets and
planning tools replaced

91%

named Excel and tool sprawl
as their starting problem

1512+

industrial projects
managed in parallel

10 days

median to the first
self-planned project

*Every figure on this page comes from a full survey of all live Linetrack implementations, as of August 2026. Multiple answers were possible for the starting problems.

Definition

What is a Gantt chart?

A Gantt chart is a bar chart: every task appears as a horizontal bar on a timeline, its length the duration, its position the date. Henry Gantt popularised the format in production control from the 1910s onward. Today it has to do more than illustrate: carry dependencies, resources and a view across every parallel project.

The underlying idea is older than the name – Karol Adamiecki described a comparable harmonogram back in 1896. The principle has not changed since; the context has. A bar chart is no longer something you pin to a wall, it is the surface of live project planning and control. How Linetrack organises the structure, dates and tasks behind it is covered by the project planning module.

In practice

Why do Gantt charts in Excel fail?

Excel can draw bars – a date column, conditional formatting, done. The break does not happen when you draw the chart, it happens when you have to run it. Across the live Linetrack implementations surveyed, more than 400 planning tools were replaced, most of them Excel spreadsheets. 91% of customers named Excel and tool sprawl as one of their main reasons for switching (multiple answers possible).

Dependencies are drawn, not calculated. An Excel bar does not know that assembly can only start once engineering is finished. If the task before it moves, everything downstream stays put until someone drags it by hand.
Resources are missing from the same picture. The plan shows when something is supposed to happen, but not whether engineering has any capacity that week. Utilization sits in a second file or in the ERP system – and is rarely updated at the same moment.
One file equals one project. Twenty parallel projects mean twenty files. The question of which department is overbooked in March cannot be answered in any single one of them – it only emerges from the sum.
Maintenance depends on one person. Usually the project manager maintains the plan for everyone. Departments report their status by phone or e-mail, and every update has to be typed in by hand. If that one person is away, planning freezes.
The plan is older than the meeting. By the time the status has been collected, consolidated and circulated as a PDF, days have passed. The discussion then revolves around a state of affairs that no longer exists.

Single-project planners such as MS Project solve the first two points: they understand task relationships and calculate the critical path - Linetrack does the same, with the capacity histogram right below it. They do not solve points three to five – a plan remains a file with exactly one owner. In those same implementations, MS Project plans were replaced too. Anyone running several projects at once therefore does not need a better file, but a shared data foundation: the step to multi-project management.

Core argument

A Gantt picture or a Gantt plan

A Gantt chart is trivial to draw and hard to run. Every spreadsheet, every presentation tool and every online Gantt tool can put bars on a timeline. The difference between a Gantt picture and a Gantt plan is not in the visualization – it is in what sits behind it.

A Gantt plan has three things behind the bar: dependencies that actually take effect when something moves. Resources that carry out the task. And a second, third and fourth project plan drawing on those same resources. Take one of them away and the bar chart is a status graphic.

The test is simple: drag one task two weeks later. A picture changes colour. A plan tells you which successor tasks move with it, which department is pushed beyond its capacity as a result, and which other project has booked the same design engineer for exactly that period.

That answer is precisely why the schedule view and the resource view are not separate in Linetrack: the bar chart and the capacity histogram sit on top of each other and read the same data. How that connection works in detail is covered on the scheduling and capacity planning page.

400+

Excel spreadsheets and planning tools replaced

1512+

industrial projects managed in parallel

Inside Linetrack

The bar chart is a surface, not a file

In Linetrack the Gantt chart is not a separate document but a view onto the work breakdown structure. Work packages and tasks are created once; the bar chart shows them on the timeline – with task relationships, milestones and the progress reported back by the people doing the work.

Planning happens by drag and drop: pull a bar, extend it, link it. What is new is not the gesture but what it triggers. Every task carries the department and the hours that deliver it – which is why every shift is simultaneously a statement about resources. The wider frame is set out on the project planning and control overview.

Gantt planning in Linetrack with tasks, dependencies and milestones on a timeline

Because all projects live in the same data foundation, planning is not left to the project manager alone. Departments maintain their own tasks in the same plan, and the bar chart stays current without anyone collecting status by phone. That is the practical difference between multi-project management and twenty separately maintained files.

Impact

What happens when you move a task

Below the bar chart sits the capacity histogram: same timeline, same data, but the department's view instead of the project's. It shows available capacity and workload per department across all projects – not just the one currently open.

When a task moves, its hours move with it in the histogram. If that pushes a department beyond its capacity, you see it on the same screen – before the commitment to the customer, not after. How far plan and reality drift apart over time is then shown by the planned-versus-actual comparison.

Project management dashboard with Gantt chart and capacity histogram per department

That lets you simulate a shift first and decide afterwards: alternative scenarios are played through in the system, taken into the project meeting and selected there. What Linetrack deliberately does not do is replan automatically. The software shows the consequence of a decision – the decision itself is made by people who know the customer, the machine and the commitment.

In comparison

Gantt in Excel or a single-project planner
versus Linetrack

The question is rarely whether a tool can display bars – they all can. The question is what happens on the second, fifth and twentieth project. Six points where a Gantt picture differs from a cross-project bar chart.

Aspect	Gantt in Excel / single-project planner
Dependencies	Drawn, or linked within one plan only	Linked – a shift ripples through the chain
Resources in the same plan	Not included – second file or ERP system	Histogram directly below the bar chart
Several projects at once	One file per project	All projects on one data foundation
Milestones and buffers	Drawn as bars, with no scheduling logic behind them	Real elements that recalculate when a task moves
Impact of a shift	Surfaces at the next meeting	Visible instantly, in other projects too
Plan vs. actual in the same plan	Second file or manual reconciliation	Actuals feed into the same bar chart

An online Gantt tool solves distribution: everyone sees the same state in the browser, nobody works from an outdated copy. It does not answer whether that state is feasible – for that, capacity has to live in the same system. This distinction runs through all of project planning and control and becomes a question of multi-project management from the second parallel project onwards.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Still have questions?

Book a meeting with our team.

What is a Gantt chart?

A Gantt chart is a bar chart that shows a project's tasks on a timeline: the length of a bar equals its duration, its position the date. Connections between bars show dependencies, diamonds mark milestones. The format is named after Henry Gantt, who popularised it in production control from the 1910s onward.

How do you create a Gantt chart?

In four steps: break the project down into work packages and tasks, set a duration and a responsible department for each task, define the dependencies between tasks, and mark the milestones. The bar chart comes afterwards – it is the result of that structuring, not a substitute for it. In Linetrack the chart grows straight out of the work breakdown structure, so there is nothing to draw separately.

Is Excel suitable for Gantt charts?

For a single, manageable project, yes. As soon as dependencies, shared resources or several projects come into play, maintenance costs more than the chart is worth: Excel does not calculate task relationships, knows nothing about capacity and keeps every project in its own file. Across the Linetrack implementations surveyed, most of the more than 400 replaced planning tools were Excel spreadsheets.

What is the difference between a Gantt chart and a bar chart?

In substance, none – bar chart is simply the plainer term for the same visualization, and the German industrial equivalent is Balkenplan. Both mean tasks shown as bars on a timeline. The difference that matters is not the term but the implementation: a printed graphic, or a view onto a live project data foundation.

Which Gantt software is suitable for several projects at once?

One in which all projects sit on the same data foundation and resources are managed across projects. What counts is not the number of views but whether a shift in project A becomes visible in project B. Linetrack is built for exactly that: 1,512 industrial projects are currently managed in parallel, ranging from 5 to 270 per customer. How schedules and capacity connect is explained on the scheduling and capacity planning page.

What does an online Gantt tool cost at Linetrack?

Linetrack starts at 10 € per user and month. Licensing is modular and depends on the number of users, their roles and the functional modules booked – read-only access to the bar chart costs less than full use including scheduling and capacity planning. The actual price depends on how many departments plan in the system.

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