PERT Chart Maker

A PERT chart maps project activities, durations, and dependencies to reveal parallel work, schedule slack, and the critical path. Open a finished example below, or describe your own PERT chart. Free, no signup; hourly fair-use limits apply.

List the activities needed to finish the project, give each one a duration, and name its immediate predecessors. Use a single unit, such as days, throughout the request. Dependencies matter more than the order in which you write the tasks: a frontend build that depends on both design and an API must wait for both, even if one branch finishes much earlier.

The activity-on-node view places scheduling fields around each activity. The renderer computes early and late timing, slack, and the critical path from the durations and dependencies. Critical activities have no slack under those inputs, so a delay there moves the calculated project finish unless another assumption changes. A project network does not automatically account for weekends, resource contention, holidays, or people working on multiple tasks. Review those constraints separately before treating the diagram as a delivery commitment.

Try the software-project activity-on-arrow example to compare an alternate notation, the product-launch network to inspect merging parallel branches, or the online-shop example to group activities by team. Open an example immediately, then describe your own tasks and owners in the prompt. Check that no prerequisite is missing and that the network has no dependency cycle. This maker uses the duration you provide for each activity; if you use three-point PERT estimates, calculate the expected duration before entering it. Download the result for a planning discussion and revise it when estimates or dependencies change.