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A forty-task Gantt chart hides a lot.
One subtask quietly falls three days behind, and nothing on screen tells you — unless you scroll through every row and compare planned dates to today’s date by eye. Most project managers find out a task has slipped the same way they always have: someone brings it up in the status meeting, or the finish date has already passed by the time anyone notices.
WBS Gantt-Chart for Jira has a way to catch this automatically.
Warning Alerts sit in Gantt Configuration → Alerts and mark tasks with a colored “!” icon based on rules you set: pick a status (an individual status or a whole status category), pick whether the trigger is the start date or the finish date, and set how many hours before or after that date the alert should fire: negative values fire the alert early, as a heads-up before anything is actually late.
The default setup covers the basics out of the box: green three days before a task’s start date, yellow once the start date has passed with no work begun, and red once the finish date has passed with the task still open. Clicking any alert jumps straight to that task’s bar on the Gantt chart.
Picture a delivery manager running a forty-task client implementation plan across three workstreams. Instead of opening the Gantt chart each morning and scanning every row for red flags, she checks one thing: whether any alerts are showing.
On a Tuesday, a yellow alert appears on a task that was supposed to start Monday; she catches it two days before it would have hit the red “finish date passed” alert, follows up with the assignee, and the client status call on Friday has one less surprise in it.
The point isn’t the color coding, it’s that the plan starts telling you when it’s wrong, instead of waiting for you to ask. That’s the difference between a schedule you have to babysit and one that flags its own risk.
Alert rules are configured per Gantt chart, so you can set different thresholds for a fast-moving sprint plan versus a multi-month program rollout.
Full setup steps, including how status categories and hour offsets interact, are in Gantt alert settings and Viewing due dates and task delays.
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