Gantt Chart

A Century-Old Idea That Stuck

Henry Gantt developed this chart type around 1910 to visualize production schedules in American factories. The concept was brilliantly simple: time runs left to right, items stack vertically, and horizontal bars show duration. Over a hundred years later, the same basic layout powers most project and resource scheduling tools.

But there's an important fork in how Gantt charts get used. Traditional project management Gantt charts put *tasks* on the vertical axis — design phase, development sprint, QA cycle — and show dependencies between them. Resource-focused Gantt charts flip this: *people* go on the vertical axis, and the bars represent allocations to specific projects.

Gantt for Resources, Not Just Tasks

That second version is what matters for agencies and studios. You don't just need to know that "the website project runs March through May." You need to know *who's on it*, for how many hours, and whether they're overbooked during week three because two projects overlap.

WrkSched's timeline is essentially a resource Gantt — team members as rows, weeks and months as columns, color-coded bars for each project. You can zoom between day, week, and month levels. The difference from a static Gantt exported as a PDF? Everything's interactive. Drag an allocation to move it, grab its edge to resize, split it when plans change.

The classic Gantt concept of "bar on a timeline" still works. It just needed to become clickable, zoomable, and connected to real capacity data — not a printout pinned to a factory wall.