Leisa Reichelt on Where’s the Gantt gone?

Leisa Reichelt laments the rapidly disappearing Gantt chart, and critiques the new GoPlan, a Basecamp competitor from WeBreakStuff:

[from Where’s the Gantt gone? at disambiguity]

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!

I agree that I would like to have dependencies across tasks and/or milestones in projects, or at least subtasks -- which might amount to the same thing.

I have put in a request to beta GoPlan and I will do a writeup as soon as I can fool with it.

tags: goplan, basecamp, gantt+charts, leisa+reichelt, webreakstuff

Comments

[Fred]

Even though you spelled our name wrong - and we're not a Basecamp competitor either -, we sent over an invite ;-). I posted about our approach to Gantt diagrams over at:

http://blog.goplan.org/2006/10/01/gantt-shift2006-and-updates/

PS: didn't get a chance to say goodbye over at shift. Hope your trip back was okay.

[Stowe Boyd]

Fred - Fixed the name; apologies; thanks for the invite. Of course you are a Basecamp competitor!