Personal blog. I write about what I learn as I am learning it

What a CPM Schedule Is, and How to Build One

A CPM schedule is not a chart. It is the output of an arithmetic procedure you could run on the back of an envelope: two passes over a list of tasks and the links between them. The bars you end up looking at are just a drawing of the answer. I think most of the confusion around the term starts there — people are shown the picture and told it is the method.

So here is the method itself, worked end to end on a real plan: a 21-task house renovation, five trades, no invented numbers. Every figure below came out of the same file, and you can run it yourself in a minute.

Gantt chart of a 21-task renovation showing critical tasks in orange and tasks with slack in blue, with daily resource load rows underneath. — The drawing at the end of the arithmetic. Orange bars have no room to move; blue ones do.

A Construction Schedule Template That Counts Crew

Download any free construction schedule template and you get the same thing: a task list, durations, start and finish dates, and a bar chart. What you almost never get is a column for how many people each task needs, and a row underneath that adds them up. Which is odd, because on a real job the binding constraint is rarely the calendar. It is that there are three electricians.

I built one with that row in it. It is free, it is a normal Excel file, and this is what the extra column changes.

Gantt Chart in Google Sheets: What Actually Ports

I built a scheduling template for Excel and then did the thing everybody does, which is open it in Google Sheets to see what survived. Most of a Gantt chart in Google Sheets works exactly as it does in Excel — the date maths, the lookups, the bars. One design decision in the file exists specifically because of what does not survive a trip between spreadsheet programs, and it is worth explaining, because it is the kind of thing that fails quietly rather than loudly.

This is the Google Sheets half of the template I wrote about when I built the Excel version. Same file, same six tabs — you can download the Excel version or copy the Google Sheets version, whichever saves you a step.

Bar chart of how many working days each task moves when the schedule is solved against a real crew limit. Eleven of twenty-one tasks move, by three to fourteen days; ten do not move at all. — Eleven of twenty-one tasks move once the crew limit is real. If the file arrives with every task reading as pinned, this chart comes back empty and the tool still reports success.

Gantt Chart in Excel: The Part Templates Leave Out

Every tutorial on building a Gantt chart in Excel stops in the same place. You end up with a task list, a Start column, a Days column, and a conditional-formatting rule that paints a bar across a grid of dates. It looks like a schedule. It is a picture of dates you typed in yourself, and it will keep looking correct long after it has stopped being true.

I spent a weekend building the version I actually wanted — one where Start is calculated, weekends are skipped, and a row underneath tells me how many people the plan is quietly assuming I have. Here is what went into it and where the spreadsheet honestly runs out of road.

Gantt chart of a 21-task renovation with a crew load row underneath. Every task bar is within capacity on its own, but the daily total for the general crew peaks at five people against a crew of three, and is over capacity on 14 days. — Nothing is over-allocated task by task. The plan just quietly assumes five people for fourteen days.

Your Project Software Is Guessing at Resource Leveling

Every project management package has a button that fixes an over-allocated schedule. Microsoft Project calls it Level Resources. Primavera calls it resource leveling. You click it, the bars slide right, the red goes away, and you get a new finish date. What none of them tell you is how far that new date sits from the best one available.

I went looking for someone who had actually measured it. I found a paper from 1999 — and then noticed something strange about what happened to the topic afterwards.

Bar chart of daily crew demand on a 17-task renovation project. Demand sits at two or three people most days but spikes to five for four days in late October, above the dashed line marking the three-person crew that is actually available. — Nothing is over-allocated on paper. The plan just quietly assumes five people for four days.

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