I absolutely love and live by Gantt charts. In my undergraduate studies, we would use MS Project Gantt charts and Visio high-level schedules to organize and plan the steps it takes to develop new design concepts and prototypes. I currently work in project management and each program has their own Gantt chart for their own element teams and each project has an extensively detailed Gantt chart for the overall project (including the details necessary from each element team). Then a Visio schedule is made for the critical path items in the schedule to simplify the MS Project Gantt chart for the team to overview. Using Gantt charts is a simple way to automatically update your entire project schedule, clearly visualize resource constraints, manage outside vendors, and even has a illustration of the schedule through blocks and relative arrows to the critical paths. The Gantt charts for our projects need to be approved by the Project Development Committee every month for budgeting and project status approvals.