Outsourcing Gantt Chart
This is a practical guide to building a gantt chart for an outsourcing project — a bar-chart view of the schedule showing tasks, durations and dependencies, adapted to the realities of outsourcing a function to an external provider.
What a Gantt Chart is
A gantt chart is a bar-chart view of the schedule showing tasks, durations and dependencies. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Gantt Chart. On an outsourcing project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for an Outsourcing project
Outsourcing projects live or die on outsourcing a function to an external provider. A well-built gantt chart gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how outsourcing projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- Task bars by start/end date
- Dependency links
- Milestones
- Owners/resources
- Baseline overlay
Outsourcing-specific considerations
Tailor the gantt chart to the risks that most often derail outsourcing projects:
- Knowledge transfer
- Service-level definition
- People impact
Example
On a real outsourcing project, the gantt chart would be shaped by outsourcing a function to an external provider. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — knowledge transfer, service-level definition, people impact — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.