All about Gantt chart in SAP Cloud ALM

In this blog post, you will learn

1. What is Gantt chart and how to see it
2. How to explore and use Gantt chart
3. What are advanced features of Gantt chart

Then, let’s get started.

1. What is Gantt chart and how to see it

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that shows a project schedule and dependency relationships between activities. SAP Cloud ALM provides this Gantt chart view, so that the users can see the dependency of tasks and identify bottlenecks. Especially, SAP Activate methodology and SAP Cloud ALM deliver content and support creation of tasks in a structured hierarchy as you can see below, and this hierarchy, in conjunction with the schedule, can be visualized on Gantt chart.

To see this Gantt chart view, you can click an icon at the top right side. You can simply switch between the task list view and the Gantt chart view by clicking left and right side of the switch.

Gantt chart view icon (right-side)

2. How to explore and use Gantt chart

Here, you can see the Gantt chart.

There are some control buttons in the top right side. From the leftmost icon, you can zoom-in or zoom-out the graph, check the list of legend, and change the setting. Regarding Release Version and Sprint from the list of legend, you can see them at the very top of the chart.

List of Legend

Furthermore, you can collapse or expand the hierarchy of items (Phase > Deliverable > Task).

Collapse view

Expand view

With this collapse and expand function, you can also have a deliverable view. This is one of advantages to use Gantt chart, because this deliverable view is not supported in task list view.

Deliverable view

Now, when you look at the left side of the Gantt chart, you see the columns of Title, Status, Start Date and End Date. For the item in each row, you can see an icon. These icons vary depending on which item it is: Template task, Project task, Sub-task, and User Story.

Icons of Project task, Sub-task, User Story and Template task (From the top)

In the Status column, you can directly change the status of each item to Open, In Progress, Blocked, Done, Not Relevant.

Status change

When you click on each item, you can see the details of the task on the right side.

Detail view of task

3. What are advanced features of Gantt chart

Last but not least, let’s go over some advanced features that will help your use of Gantt chart further convenient and easy.

First one is Mass Edit. As you could guess from the name, this function enables you to edit multiple tasks simultaneously. If you click more than one task from the list, the Mass Edit button at the top will be activated so that you can click it. Then, you can edit Status, Priority, Release Version, and other properties of multiple tasks in one action.

Mass Edit window

Second, you can edit the span or the timing of each task intuitively by dragging the timebox. When you hover on the far left or far right side of the timebox, the mouse icon will be changed to two-way arrow. Then you can make the timebox longer or shorter as you want. Or you can also move the timebox to the place you want to put.

Dragging timebox

Lastly, you can also edit relation of two tasks directly from the Gantt chart. However, please keep in mind that you can not edit the relationship of template task to prevent incurring confusion in the defined order of tasks. To edit the relationship, you can click the timebox, then two small squares will appear at both ends of the box. You can click and drag this square to the edge of the other task that you want to create relationship with the current one. After creating the relation, you can check this relation from the detailed page of the task such as “Successor” or “Predecessor”.

Creating Relationship between tasks

Relationship created

If you want to delete the existing relationship, you can right-click the relationship arrow and you will see Delete Relationship box.

Delete Relationship

4. Conclusion

From this posting, you’ve learned what Gantt chart is in SAP Cloud ALM and what functions this chart supports. In case you have further questions, you can always search Q&A in the community or post your own question with SAP Cloud ALM tag.

5. Next steps

Hope you found this information useful. Please visit the Expert Portal and this master blog post for more information on SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation.

Please feel free to reach out to us if you are looking for more information. We would love to hear from you!