the plan is a hypothesis

Everything built during planning — the WBS, the schedule, the budget — is a prediction, not a guarantee. Tracking progress is how a team finds out whether reality is matching that prediction, early enough to do something about it if it isn't. Different tools answer that question for different audiences, and using the wrong one for a given audience either buries them in detail or leaves them with too little to act on.

gantt charts: the detailed schedule

A Gantt chart shows every task as a horizontal bar plotted against time, with dependency arrows connecting related tasks. It's the closest visual equivalent to the sequenced project plan itself — useful for the project team and PM tracking day-to-day schedule reality against the plan, including which tasks on the critical path are slipping. It's usually too detailed to be useful for an audience that just wants to know "are we on track."

roadmaps: the strategic view

A roadmap strips away task-level detail and shows only major milestones and phases over a coarser timeframe — quarters instead of days, themes instead of individual tasks. It's built for leadership, customers, or other teams who need to know direction and timing without needing (or wanting) the underlying schedule. A roadmap answers "what's coming and roughly when"; a Gantt chart answers "what's happening this week and what's it waiting on."

burndown (and burnup) charts

A burndown chart, common in Agile sprints, plots remaining work (often in story points) against time, alongside an ideal straight-line pace to the sprint's end. If the actual line sits above the ideal line, the team is behind pace; below it, ahead. It's a fast visual read for a team tracking its own short-term progress.
A burndown chart has a blind spot: if scope grows mid-sprint (new work added), the remaining-work line can look flat or even rise, which is easy to misread as "no progress." A burnup chart fixes this by plotting two lines — work completed and total scope — so a scope increase shows up clearly as the total-scope line moving, rather than hiding inside the remaining-work number.

status reports

A status report is the periodic written summary that ties the other tools together for stakeholders who won't be looking at a Gantt chart or burndown chart directly. A good one is short and consistent in structure: what got done this period, what's coming next, current risks or blockers, and an overall health indicator.
Many teams use a simple RAG status (Red/Amber/Green) as that headline indicator — green (on track), amber (at risk, being actively managed), red (off track, needs help) — because it lets a busy stakeholder get the one-word answer before deciding whether to read further.

a short example

A team runs a two-week sprint to build a search feature, starting at 40 story points. Their burndown shows a flatter-than-ideal line for the first three days — not because of slow work, but because a task was re-estimated upward after the team discovered the existing search index needed a schema change first. The scrum team sees this immediately on the burndown and adjusts; the weekly status report sent to leadership summarizes it in one line ("schema change added mid-sprint, sprint status: Amber, on track to finish one day late") instead of expecting them to interpret the chart themselves.

practical notes

A tracking tool is only as good as how consistently it's updated. A Gantt chart or burndown that's a week stale trains people to stop trusting it, and once that happens, it stops doing its job even if it's technically still "there."
Pick the tool by audience, not by habit: don't send a leadership team a Gantt chart because it's what the PM happens to have open, and don't try to run a sprint off a quarterly roadmap.

related topics

reference