Gantt Chart for a Patient Satisfaction Survey

A Gantt chart is only worth drawing if it encodes dependencies, and that is the difference between a plan and a decorated list. Ten items over nine months at one physician practice means each task averages a few weeks, so the granularity is at the level of 'design the instrument', 'pilot with twenty patients', 'train front desk staff' rather than 'do the survey'. What makes it a project plan is that some of those cannot start until others finish: you cannot pilot an instrument you have not designed, cannot train staff on a process you have not finalised, and cannot analyse data you have not collected. Others can genuinely run in parallel — securing leadership sponsorship, checking whether the organisation already collects comparable data, and preparing the analysis plan can all happen while the instrument is being drafted, and showing that overlap is what makes nine months feasible.

Two things separate a strong submission. First, work backwards from the goal: the point is improved patient satisfaction, not a completed survey, so the last items on the chart should be feeding results back and acting on them rather than producing a report. A chart that ends at data collection has modelled a measurement exercise and missed the assignment's own framing. Second, put slack somewhere visible. Nine months is comfortable for this scope, which means the plan should show where the float sits and which items are on the critical path — the sequence where a delay pushes everything after it. Name your milestones as decisions rather than as dates: instrument approved, pilot complete, collection closed, findings presented. And read the case for its own obstacles, since the assignment expects your chart to respond to what went wrong at Leonard-Griggs rather than to a generic rollout.