Actions in KF can be ordered in time (in section Components -> Previous actions) and displayed as a Gantt chart. The purpose is not to use KF as a project management tool but rather as a time estimator.
A traditional Gantt chart is calendar-anchored: every task has a start date, an end date, and a duration expressed in working days that accounts for weekends, public holidays, team calendars, and resource availability. This level of detail is appropriate when a project is in execution and dates are commitments, but not during planning.
In the early stages of a project — when the scope is still being shaped, dependencies are being identified, and effort is being estimated — calendar precision is false precision. Attaching specific dates to rough estimates implies a confidence that does not exist. It also creates maintenance burden: every time an estimate changes, the whole schedule shifts, and a calendar-based tool requires manual correction of every downstream date.
This Gantt works in weeks of effort, not calendar dates. Durations are expressed in days or weeks, and the timeline is a sequence of week slots — Week 1, Week 2, and so on — without any calendar anchoring by default.
The only configuration parameters are:
These two values define the conversion ratio between days and weeks. A 3-day task at 8 h/day and 40 h/week occupies 0.6 of a week slot. The ratio can be adjusted to reflect part-time work, a shorter workweek, or shared resources without changing any task durations.
Tasks are scheduled by dependency. Each task starts as soon as all its predecessors are complete. The engine resolves the full dependency graph and computes earliest-start positions for every task, expressed as fractional week offsets from the origin.
Parallel tracks — tasks with no dependency on each other — are placed independently and rendered on separate rows, making concurrency visible without any manual layout.
Milestones mark points where one phase ends and another begins. They carry no duration; they simply reflect the completion of their dependencies.
When a project moves from estimation into planning, a start week can be assigned. The relative timeline is then relabelled using ISO 8601 week numbers (W15/2026, W16/2026, ...). The scheduling logic does not change, only the column labels.
This makes the transition from rough estimate to anchored plan a single parameter change, not a rebuild.
A relative Gantt is generic by design. Because it carries no calendar dates, it is not tied to a specific project instance — it describes the shape of a type of project: its phases, their typical durations, and the dependencies between them.
This makes it a vehicle for transferring experience. A team that has delivered similar projects before holds tacit knowledge about how long things actually take — not in the abstract, but for their domain, their context, and their pace of work. A relative Gantt captures that knowledge in a reusable form. When a new project of the same kind starts, the template provides an immediate, experience-grounded baseline: here is roughly how long each phase takes, here is what runs in parallel, here is where the critical path runs.
Exact dates are beside the point. The value is in the proportions and the structure — the fact that integration typically takes half as long as development, that testing cannot start before integration, that documentation always competes with the final delivery push. That knowledge does not expire when the calendar changes.
This is not a substitute for a full project management tool during execution. It does not track actuals, handle resource conflicts, or integrate with team calendars. Those capabilities belong to a later stage, when commitments are real and progress needs to be measured. For that purpose, there is a button to download the Gantt chart in Microsoft Project XML format.
The purpose of this tool is narrower and more specific: to make the structure and duration of a plan visible during the estimation phase, with enough fidelity to communicate intent and identify sequencing problems, but without the overhead — or the false precision — of a calendar-based schedule.