Available on Asana Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers, as well as legacy tiers Premium, Business, and Legacy Enterprise.
Gantt view equips project managers with the tools to visualize and manage project plans effectively, offering insight into task durations, delivery dates, dependencies, and baseline of your project plan. Gantt view is particularly valuable for large, structured, complex projects that require meticulous planning and comparison of original plans against real-time progress.
Adding and removing Gantt view
Gantt view is available for both new and existing projects. You can add/remove Gantt view as follows:
- Click the + icon in the project tabs menu.
- Choose Gantt from the drop-down menu. Gantt view will be added as a new tab.
- To remove Gantt view, click the three dot icon beside the Gantt tab to open Tab actions.
- Select Remove from the drop-down menu and then click Remove tab.
Removing Gantt view from your project will not delete any tasks, this will simply remove the view. The view can be added again at any time.
Key benefits of Gantt view
Strategic planning: Gantt view allows you to plan and estimate essential delivery dates by leveraging task auto-scheduling and duration calculation.
End-to-end management: With a clear depiction of work schedules, including subtasks and dependencies, project managers can effectively oversee projects from start to finish, ensuring seamless coordination.
Progress monitoring: One of the standout features of Gantt view is its ability to monitor project deviations over time. By comparing current progress against an established baseline, project managers gain insights into how well a project adheres to its original plan.
Enhancements and new features: In project management, the complexity of tasks can escalate with the size of the project. Gantt view addresses this challenge by providing an intuitive interface to schedule and manage projects. This view condenses tasks, durations, key dates, and dependencies into a single, accessible location. This is particularly advantageous for larger projects, allowing project managers to gain a holistic perspective and make informed decisions.
Structured and process-oriented approach: Gantt view is not only a tool for visualizing projects; it also facilitates structured and process-oriented project management right from the outset. This is especially beneficial for projects that require well-defined workflows and adherence to procedures.
Using Gantt view
- To view a project in Gantt view, you will need to add the view to your project. Once the view has been added, open your project in Asana and navigate to the Gantt tab.
- A list style view is shown on the left, divided into sections identical to your project’s List view.
- You can filter your Gantt view to show All tasks, Completed tasks or Incomplete tasks.
- You can choose to sort your view by Days, Weeks, Months, Quarters, Half-years and Years.
- You can choose to give some members comment-only access, which means they will be able to see and comment, but not create or delete tasks.
More information on the Color, Auto-scheduling and Baseline features can be found below .
You can create chain dependencies in bulk with Gantt view. To do so, multi-select the relevant tasks and select the Chain dependencies option from the pop-up bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.
Changing the bar colors in Gantt view
You can map the colors of the bar to a custom field via the Color setting in the upper right-hand corner. This will apply to all tasks in the project.
Advantages and examples of color mapping to a custom field include:
- If your custom field represents various teams (marketing, product, design and engineering, for example), coloring the bars accordingly allows you to view which team is working on what, at a glance.
- If your custom field represents the status of a task, color mapping to that custom field would give extra visual information on the overall status of your project.
Adding a baseline
Baseline captures a snapshot of the project (including tasks, dates, durations, etc.) at a point in time. It can be used for a visual comparison of the captured vs. current project plans to show how the project has deviated over time.
- To add a baseline, open a project in Gantt view.
- Click Gant options in the upper right-hand corner above the Gantt chart.
- Add a date to the Compare baseline section. This date is the day on which you’d like to view the previous state of the project.
- Adding a date will automatically switch on the Show baseline toggle. You can click the toggle to switch this off again.
The rectangles with the diagonal hash pattern show the original plan, which you can compare against the current project shown via solid rectangles.
Each project can only have 1 baseline. Creating additional snapshots override the current snapshot.
Auto-schedule tasks
To help you quickly create your project structure, Asana will automatically assign dates to new tasks in Gantt view. As you create tasks, they’ll have consecutive date ranges as well as a duration of 1 day by default. If you zoom out to a half-year or year view, the date ranges will be populated as a duration of 5 days by default.
Auto-scheduling is enabled by default. If you wish to turn off auto-scheduling, follow the steps below:
- To turn off auto-scheduling, open a project in Gantt view.
- Click Gant options in the upper right-hand corner above the Gantt chart.
- Toggle off Auto-schedule tasks.
Additional notes:
- By default, tasks will be auto-scheduled and sorted by start date.
- If auto-scheduling is on, your first task created will have a start date of the project start date. If there is no project start date, the first task’s start date will be set to today.
- Each subsequent task will be given a due date that is one day afterwards.
- Auto-schedule mode is supported when sorting by both Start date and None, but has slightly different behavior in each. You can also manually schedule tasks.
- If auto-scheduling is disabled and then re-enabled, it will not overwrite the dates you have already added to the project.