In a recent training with executives of a Fortune 500 company, I noticed -- to my astonishment -- that several executives couldn't interpret Tracking Gantt charts correctly. They had just invested $400,000 in purchasing and installing Microsoft Project Server. Now was the time that a select group of time-pressured, well-educated, and highly-paid people would try making sense of charts that their new project management information system produced straight out of the box. Unfortunately, several of them failed the test, which is the reason I've written this article.

To keep you interested and to allow you to determine your own level of Gantt Chart literacy, I'm going to present you with some charts and ask you to interpret them before giving you my interpretation. Before we start, let’s make sure that we all use the same terms, so we all start from the same starting line, making this 100m hurdle race as fair as possible. Please, refer to Figure 1, in which you see the Tracking Gantt bars reflecting one project in the portfolio.

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