
Having been a project manager in a past life, and still working day to day on projects, I watch with interest the deployment of a range of web based project management tools. In a lot of ways it’s like a dream come true. For most of us, Microsoft Project – the only real project management tool available beforehand – is possibly the most over featured piece of software in the world.
I’ve heard it said that most people only use about 5% of Microsoft Word’s functionality… I can’t imagine what a miniscule proportion of functionality most people use in Microsoft Project. And like MS Word but worse, often times that unused functionality would rear up and cause problems for users who didn’t understand it or weren’t aware of it.
Not only that, but it’s also prohibitively expensive. So unless you’re working in a company where they’ve got the finance and inclination to pay for your license fee – you’re unlikely to get access to it.
Then along comes 37 Signals with Basecamp, BackPack and TaDa Lists . Project managers everywhere were ecstatic (not to mention all those David Allen Getting Things Done disciples). With the ability to create and assign tasks, to post messages, to do simple scheduling and starting at the bargain price of free – 37 Signals and their products soon had a lot of evangelists wondering aloud how they ever managed without these web based project management tools.
Just last night I got my invitation to check out GoPlan. It’s been developed by the team at WeBreakStuff, so I had pretty high expectations. These guys think a lot about usability and user experience, so their work should be top notch. And, I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed.
GoPlan is a spunky looking piece of web application, and it has lots of great functionality.

You can create multiple projects with multiple users (users with varied permission to access content and functionality), there’s notes, a project blog, a calendar, a file upload.
GoPlan also has two similar but different sections called Tasks and Tickets. Tasks, I assume, are things you have to do in the course of the project. You can assign it to a category but not a person, and you can assign a deadline to it (although, strangely that doesn’t make it show up in the calendar). Tickets, I assume, are for bugs and variations. You can assign a priority, a severity (is it just me, or are these two *very* similar criteria… when is a critical severity ever a low priority? I guess there are exceptions… nevermind, tangent).
Oh, and there’s a cool inbuilt ‘chat’ so you can have your rapid fire online discussions AND keep a record of what you actually decided!
All good. All a lot like the 37 Signals offering. But all slightly disappointing to someone who’s managed some reasonably complex projects in her time.
I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the Gantt Chart.
I think it’s quite interesting that both 37 Signals and WeBreakStuff have not used any visualisation tools as a part of their project management offerings. (Well, ok GoPlan has a calendar… do we count that? I might if their task deadlines integrated with the calendar, so for now.. no).
One of the most recognisable features of Microsoft Project is the Gantt chart it generates. Back when I used to make lots of big MS Project files, I thought that I was really just making those charts for my clients (they’re pretty, they look seriously impressive – wow! that’s one complicated project!… this was before Getting Real, ok!)
Interestingly, if you take a look at 37 Sig’s Manifesto for BaseCamp, this is one of the first things you’ll read:
Projects don’t fail from of a lack of charts, graphs, reports, or statistics, they fail from a lack of communication.
Ah yes. But what I’ve come to notice is that charts, graphs, reports and statistics do more than just impress clients. And they can play an important role in communication, and motivation.
What is a Gantt Chart? Well, GanttChart.com (yeah, who knew!) says:
A Gantt chart is a graphical representation of the duration of tasks against the progression of time.
You can see why that might come in handy.
At a simplistic level – nothing focusses attention like a Gantt Chart with lots of red on it – indicating that you’re way behind schedule.
On a more practical level – when constructing project plans, I’ve come to realise how much I did actually rely on the Gantt Chart to help eliminate errors in my scheduling, and to quickly see the implications of alternate scheduling, risks and delays.
When reviewing a complex project plan to see if I’d made errors in scheduling, or understanding project relationships, or if I’d just missed lots of stuff out – it was the Gantt Chart that would most quickly let me know if I’d stuffed up. Breaks in the flow, a critical path that just stops (before the end of the project), tasks that just look too long or too short compared to the tasks around them – all rapid visual indicators that something’s not right.
It get’s really hard and boring to read through a long list of tasks, and even more difficult to understand the relationships between tasks in this format. This is where the Gantt Chart comes into it’s own. Relationships between tasks and groups of tasks are immediately apparent. Tasks that are on the critical path are obvious.

In retrospect, I’d have to say that Gantt Charts were really important in eliminating errors in project planning for me, back in the day.
So, the Gantt Chart is much more than just client eye candy. It also plays a real role in faciliating the detailed planning phase of the project. It also helps with rapid comprehension of project progress and task relationships as the project continues.
Gantt Charts allow you to understand how long your project is going to take, in what order tasks need to be undertaken (no, it’s not always self evident!), and what tasks are dependent on other tasks. This means that if you move tasks around, or some tasks get delayed, you can see what’s going to happen to your project as a result.
This is all really handy stuff to know if you’re managing a team and have a deadline. It helps you communicate within the team, and to your client, early and accurately. It helps everyone make decisions.
In both the 37 Signals products as in GoPlan, there seems to be no notion of a critical path, or dependencies between tasks. To me, that means that I either have to work a lot harder to keep my projects under control or to impose a structure of my own, or that these products are only intended for reasonably simple projects where, perhaps, the deadline is not such a big deal.
I’ve been using BackPack and BaseCamp for almost as long as they’ve been available, and I have to say that they’ve certainly been valuable to me. Particularly when I was freelancing and had to manage my own tasks on several projects. In these cases though, when I was working on big projects, I was a resource (information architect) and someone else was a project manager who had the biggest Gantt Chart you’ve ever seen in your life! (I needed a separate tool just to manage my tasks!)
I find it intriguing that both 37 Sigs and GoPlan seem to have taken such an anti-chart approach to their tools (and there’s much more than just the Gantt chart that they could have included). I suspect it’s to do with the lack of the critical path. Or perhaps, they’re not actually *project* management tools, but ‘sets of tasks’ tools.
Either way – if any one’s planning a web based PM tool that *does* include a critical path and some pretty pictures… I’d really love to see it!
What about you? Do you miss the Gantt chart? or are Critical Paths soooo 1.0?
Technorati Tags: 37+Signals, BackPack, BaseCamp, GoPlan, WeBreakStuff
I always thought the difference between Priority and Severity was in terms of:
Priority = “We want this fixed NOW!” vs “we don’t really care”
Severity = “The site don’t load without it” vs “My h2 headings aren’t styled properly”
So yes, you’re unlikely to have Critical Severity but Low Priority, but if you’ve got a lot of Critical bugs (touch wood you don’t!) it provide a way of prioritising within them.
Leisa,
you’ve brilliantly echoed thoughts I’ve had on this for a while now. I too have been a project manager in a past life and really miss these visualisations in web-based apps. In fact the only PM tool I now use is Gantt centric GanttProject. I guess because I’m working on a really large enterprise IA project I’ve needed to conceptualise the entire project from the beginning with the Gantt and it somehow reassures me we are making progress. I’ve recently conceptualised a major content development process that invovles multiple stakeholders and the gantt is my primary point of reference. I actually think there’s a real need to consider the Gantt as one of the major tools/deliverables of IA/experience designers as most user-centric projects flow through multiple phases with varying degrees of dependency. Now if only the online apps would hear us!…
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Gantt charts – I love their visual power, but maintaining them has always been a major drag. In the systems I’ve used it’s always been difficult/prolemtatic/buggy to get a project to update correctly if you’ve slipped a deadline. And resource allocations have always been a nightmare.
But for larger projects they can be really useful, as long as they’re updated regularly.
Think of any web fad that has dropped out of fashion – if you implement it in a totally broken way it has high severity (it’s broken), but because no one cares it has low priority.
RSCAI tags, anyone? META keywords tags?
I’m itching for the new release of GanttProject with a task duration in hours and minutes instead of days – that’s how much I miss Gantt charts. Visual critical paths should be essential for explaining to clients, suppliers, collaborators and colleagues the dire consequences of missing deadlines. Perhaps they aren’t popular precisely BECAUSE MSProject is so over spec’ed and complicated?
Totally agree Lisa, I much prefer having a chart.
As a project manager I find the gantt chart is easily the most powerful communication tool – how someone can manage a complex project without one is beyond me. Stakeholders want to see charts, not lists, and having some simple colours for critical path, 100% complete and on hold makes any old chart infinitely more powerful.
I’m still with traditional PM packages and only use web-based solutions for small personal projects. Itching to get my hands on OmniOutlinerPro, haven’t tried it yet but it looks awesome.
Great post – I think the Gannt chart vacumn is due to what Grant & Mel mention. The overhead most Gannt chart tools creates outweighs a reasonable persons perception of their value for most software projects – There is an amazingly large number of gannt charts created for software projects, that are soon abanonded for this reason.
I’m all for visualizing schedules, but a good tool would make those visualizations a cheap side effect of my other tracking efforts, and give me ways to throttle those representations based on: the size of my team, the audience I was presenting to, etc. Build a standard Gannt chart out of 20 people and 6 months and it’s incomrehensible to all but a handful of people.
I’d really love to see all the Tufte inspired designers out there to explore ways to visualize modern engineering project work better than t pre WWI thinking does.
There’s an interesting thread on ask ET that’s discussing Gantt charts and alternatives: Project Management Graphics (and Gantt Charts) (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000076&topic_id=1)
Scott, start here.
Leisa,
This is a great post. We’re actually working on getting Gantt support into Goplan very soon. We’re still coming to terms with how to best display the information (there’s a few technicalities involved) people want to see. I believe we need new ways to look at project status information (and I guess that’s what Scott was talking about in his comment), and we’re doing some active research on that front.
I’ll probably post a few thoughts on this very soon. Thanks for testing, by the way!
[…] disambiguity: Where’s the Gantt gone? Gantt charts are tricky. They require a lot of maintenance, and are too often misused as “project design” tools by salespeople and management. […]
Eric: Start where? You’re link is broken. (Or are you making a metaphysical comment that I need to look to myself first? :)
@Scott: sorry, something went there … but Andrej posted the same link and beat me by a minute.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000076&topic_id=1
[…] Leisa Reichelt over at Disambiguity has a great post on Goplan, Gantt charts and time tracking in projects. She mentions how it seems like all web-based project management applications seem to have forgotten about Gantt. The truth is, we didn’t forget about Gantt, but we’re also unsure that Gantt is the best possible visualization scheme for project deadlines on a screen – and that’s what we’ve been thinking about. We still are planning on bringing Gantt-diagram printing capabilities into the application (there’s a bunch of you who need to print them), but we want to have a top-notch visualization for the majority of people who want to keep track of things without having to bring down more trees. […]
[…] Leisa Reichelt in a long and funny article explain why the web based project management tools are sometimes disappointing. […]
Where’s the Gantt gone? at disambiguity…
Leisa Reichelt laments the rapidly disappearing Gantt chart, and critiques the new GoPlan, a Basecamp competitor from WeBreakThings: [from Where’s the Gantt gone? at disambiguity] In both the 37 Signals products as in GoPlan, there seems to be no not…
[…] Where’s the Gantt gone? http://www.disambiguity.com by leisa.reichelt September 27, 2006 […]
Leisa, there are some project management tools that are designed as good web alternatives to MS project. Despite most of them are not very convenient, there is on that worth trying. They release new features often, but current functionality works perfectly for us. It might be interesting for you to find out how a kind of gantt chart works in Wrike:
http://www.wrike.com/blog/5/5/2007/The_Timeline_goes_live
http://www.wrike.com/blog/6/16/2007/Get_a_Timeline_on_the_way
I hope, you’ll enjoy.