Based on my experiences working within relatively big medical device project teams the two biggest things that I think are very important with regards to creating /managing gantt charts are the “critical path” and amount of “slack”. Whoever the project manager is for a project, aside from making sure that all milestones are being achieved the next thing that are going to be worried about is the critical path. The critical path refers to the path of tasks or action items within the project timeline (gantt chart), that if anyone of those tasks or action items gets delayed it delays the overall timeline of the project completion. All project managers will always want to make sure that the all items related to the critical path remain on track, and if you happen to working on one of those items for a company I am sure you will be providing a lot of status updates. The other concept related to gantt charts and project management is slack, which refers to the tasks within the project timeline that if they do get delayed do not affect the overall completion of the project timeline. It is important to know which tasks within a gantt chart are on either the critical path or have slack to be successful and efficient when creating and managing project timelines (gantt charts).