Is it possible to do a Gantt chart with a 3rd (or more) dimension?

October 8, 2014 8:15 AM

I'm working on project planning a multi-year, multi-department initiative. Each department will complete identical tasks but on staggered schedules. I'm hoping to find a way where I can create a single dataset that will then display task schedules across department, and department schedules across tasks. I am using microsoft project and microsoft excel. content sample inside

My end goal is to be able to generate the following schedule reports (as exampled in this sample):

1. Phase X's detail schedule showing when all the sub-phases are happening, as well as the roll-up showing when each phase is happening
2. Department X's detailed schedule when they are going through their phases and subphases

(This is further complicated because each phase has sub-phases which I'd like to be able to pull out as well, but I didn't add those to the sample).

There are 10 departments, with four phases, and four sub-phases in each phase, meaning 160 total deadlines. The four phase overlap, but the sub-phases within each phase do not.

I'm hoping you will tell me that in order to do this, all I have to do is click a button in the tool bar and create a linkage from one goal to the next goal, or use a simple pivot tool!

posted by rebent to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I would just do it by hand. I know you probably have a ton of departments and schedules, but for planning documents like this, a lot of times those dates need to be individually tweaked anyway.
posted by bbqturtle at 8:29 AM on October 8, 2014

Response by poster: There will be massive amounts of date changes in the future - I would like to find a way to automate the reports.
posted by rebent at 8:30 AM on October 8, 2014

Would something like this work?
posted by Michele in California at 10:41 AM on October 8, 2014