Gantt Charts and Build Schedules

Why You Need a Schedule

Six weeks disappears fast. Without a written schedule, teams discover in week five that the robot still cannot pick up a game piece and there is no time left to practice driving. A schedule turns a vague hope into dated, assigned, trackable commitments.

The Gantt Chart

A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart where each row is a task and each bar spans the days that task should take. It is the traditional engineering tool for tracking a project day-by-day across its discrete sub-systems. You can build one in Google Sheets, Microsoft Project, or a tool like TeamGantt.

A simple build-season Gantt might have rows like:

• Strategy & game analysis (days 1-3)
• Drivetrain design (days 2-8)
• Intake prototype (days 4-12)
• Scoring mechanism design (days 6-16)
• Wiring & electrical (days 14-24)
• Programming & autonomous (days 16-30)
• Driver practice & reliability (days 30-40)

Dependencies and the Critical Path

The power of a Gantt chart is showing dependencies — tasks that cannot start until another finishes. Programming an arm cannot be fully tested until the arm is wired; wiring cannot finish until the arm is built. The longest chain of dependent tasks is your critical path , and any delay on it delays the whole robot. Identify your critical path early and protect it.

Work Backward from Deadlines

Good scheduling is backward planning. Start from your first competition date and subtract:

• Days needed for driver practice (do not skip this).
• Days for reliability testing and bug-fixing.
• A buffer for the inevitable things that break.

Whatever is left is your actual design-and-build window, which is almost always shorter than teams expect.

Build in Slack

Never schedule to 100% capacity. Experienced teams deliberately leave slack time because prototypes fail, parts arrive late, and snow days happen. A common rule of thumb is to plan for the robot to be “done” a week before your event, leaving that final week purely for practice and fixes.

Keep It Visible and Updated

A Gantt chart only works if people look at it. Print it large in the shop, review it at the start of each meeting, and update it when reality diverges from the plan. A schedule that is never updated quickly becomes fiction. The business or project-management lead often owns keeping it current, coordinating across sub-teams so dependencies stay honest.

Key takeaways

• A Gantt chart maps tasks to days and exposes dependencies between sub-systems.
• The critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks and determines when the robot is truly done.
• Plan backward from your first event, reserving time for driver practice and reliability testing.
• Always build in slack and keep the chart visible and updated, or it becomes fiction.

This lesson was adapted from learnfrc.com.