I'm looking for a project management tool similar to gantt but... different
I'm wondering if this type of tool exists. Basically, I am senior dev of a 3 man dev team at a non-tech company. I maintain 60 or so web apps for our 300-400 users (all internal apps) as well as act as jack of all trades when it comes to SQL, IIS, self hosted and cloud hosted windows server boxes, VMware, etc. Basically, I have a lot of spinning plates.
We are in active development but we get interrupted a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Because of this, we don't really work based on deadlines but more on timelines. Upper management knows that things get priority over other things and we have to move things around and pivot a lot, so as long as we can explain why a project took 6 more months than we projected, it's fine.
So having said all that, I'm looking for a timeline system similar to gantt but I want the ability to have more than one "timespan" per task/row.
So for example let's say I'm building a to-do app and one of the tasks is to figure out the theme/color scheme of the app. I think this will take 3 days, and I don't really need to be more specific than that, they aren't trying to micro manage. However, I got interrupted and pulled off the project in the middle of that task, so I worked on it for 1 day, I had other things for 3 days, and I came back to finish the last two days.
In this case, in a gantt chart, your task can only be one "timespan" per "row" and in order for me to chart what actually happened, I need to add multiple subtasks to that task and the task ends up taking 3 rows of space.
This is rough to read and annoying to have to rearrange and insert new subtasks and rearrange subsequent tasks along the timeline.
Is there a tool out there that handles this more "ad-hoc" scheduling that I'm looking for?
Ideally what I would like is for me to be able to put together a full estimate of time for the project (say 3 months) with the ability to cascade schedule changes down when a task in the middle goes on longer than expected or gets interrupted.
I would like to have categories or color mapping so we can see which timespans are interruptions and which are tasks done and tasks to do.
Am I asking too much? Does gantt have this ability and I've not found the right vendor?
Right now my temporary solution is excel but it's a beating to have to go shift things every time I have an interruption, I feel like I spend more time explaining what happened than I do actually programming, haha
Edit: I've seen things like Monday.com and Microsoft project, but these are really heavy and too specific for my needs, I don't want a lot of context or setting up a kanban board or anything like that, I just want effectively an interactive timeline with simple "I'm doing this for x days" and not much else in terms of percent complete, details of the task, sprint integration, etc.
Think trello in complexity, just time-based and sideways 😅
I don't want to be a project manager, I don't have time for that - I just need the ability to quickly track interruptions and be able to use it as backup if upper management comes poking around
You have an unusual planning strategy, so its not too surprising if standard tools don't do what you want.
solution ideas
Excel is probably a reasonable solution here if you can separate the planned activity from the "as worked" reality. You have a sheet that contains the planned projects, task breakdowns, and time estimates. You have a second sheet where people document their actual tasks worked, and when you insert a task for another project due to priority shift, you document the reason for it.
Then you set up two sheets that use this data for visualization. One is a timeline for the past that colors in cells based on the actual work done. Second is a timeline for the future, which shows your prioritized timeline from today into the future, built by taking the actual time work / tasks completed off the planned estimates.
The first sheet is for understanding what work was actually done, the second sheet is for seeing what the updated completion estimate is for any project.
Honestly though, as I write this out, this is the kind of thing that JIRA is for. There are already templates with "hours worked"/"hours remaining" fields that can do the projection roll up, and if people update them with their progress this would also show what was done. The timeline features they rolled out a few years ago greatly improved the planning aspects.
The JIRA learning curve ia pretty steep, but I believe you can create a free account to try it out and see if it works for you if you don't already have access.
I tried to offer a solution in the vein you asked for because I hate getting the "YoU aRe WrOnG tO WaNT thIS" feedback online, but I think you might benefit from taking a closer look at what is required from your processes. You didn't provide all the context, but I wonder if this is one of those "boiled frog" situations where this idea of instant reactivity is required. I would expect your turnover to be pretty high. Most developers I have worked with would not tolerate this kind of environment for very long.
One thought: you mentioned that it's a pain to update the excel sheet you have, but how often are you doing that? Is daily accuracy required, or are weekly or monthly projection updates enough? You mentioned management not caring if something is delayed six months one a good reason, so that sounds like a much lower level of granularity might work and be less painful to update.
Second thought is whether all these interruptions are necessary. I don't like everything about scrum/agile, but the idea of protecting you planning is one of the valuable things. Even if you did it on a weekly basis -- not a full sprint process, just a planning update where you reassign tasks based on "urgent" requests from the previous week, you'd cut down a lot on your churn and your need to readjust your projections. With such a small team and so many applications to support, what happens if more than two things are on fire at once? I bet something gets deprioritized, and the world doesn't end. So if you can make that the norm, things would be simpler.
I also wonder if your manager is providing you any cover in this. I would expect that from my manager if I was in the position you described. It might be worth trying to educate them a little on different strategies to get better quality of life for your team.
Haha, well I could definitely be the frog but it's not as bad as it sounds (or maybe it is). We are just a really small team in a company that is not a tech company (commercial real estate), and that generally requires more agility than a traditional project management system would offer without being very overbearing.
Our projects are all internal tools and processes for other departments within the company, so they aren't generally more than a few weeks of dev time per project (many projects are just feature requests that take a day or 2). However, this particular project is massive (it's a custom commission system for our brokerage dept) and is slated to take ~5 months.
Besides project development, we are our own QA, testing, debugging, bugfixing after deployment, server maintainers, etc, so we shift focus constantly. It's not at all ideal for pure programming, but we wear many hats.
I've been here ~11 years, decent salary, 7.5 hr days, 30 days PTO, flexible schedule (my wife has cancer and is in a city 3 hours away all week, so I have to handle my 2 kids and their schedules along with a full time job and they don't mind at all, they're sympathetic to my situation) - I don't say these things to brag or anything (I could probably fish around for higher salary, for example), after all these years I may very well be the frog simmering in a 212f Jacuzzi but I don't mind, it's just a different day-to-day than devs usually expect.
To your point about using excel with two sheets and a visualization sheet, I may give that a shot, I didn't really consider doing it that way. To be honest I don't use Excel a ton, but that makes sense. I'll give it a shot!
Here is something I threw together in Excel. I enjoy this kind of project so it kind of got out of hand. Please ignore it if it's not useful, but I'm happy to chat about finalizing it if it is.
This is a little different than what I originally described, but I think it is close to what you are asking for. It doesn't have a timeline view (yet), but the rollup table shows start and end dates based on:
The date projections use the WORKDAY function, so they take weekends (but not holidays) into account. this can be tweaked of course.
There's some fuzziness here, for example, if the in-progress tasks are multiple days, it doesn't account for partial work completed on them, but one could add a column for this to the Work Log subtract that out. However, if the number and duration of in-progress tasks is small, it probably doesn't matter.
The very simplest timeline to build from this would be one column per day, with the columns made very thin and weeks numbers made by merging cells in a top row. The timeline forumlas set the cell values by seeing if that column's day is in the done, deferred, in progress, or todo part of the timeline for that project, then you can use conditional formatting to color the cells. Depending on the timespan you want to cover, day cells might not work, so some formula work to quantize things into fractional weeks would be the next approach.
You'll see a number of conventions I've used when making excel tools like this.
This does a decent job of projecting forward for unfinished projects, but you'd want to think about how (or if) you care about tracking the work log data (seeing how many tasks each dev completed, etc). If you don't care about that, then you can just delete entries for completed projects periodically. If you do care, then how that sheet gets organized would be decided by what you want to track and what frequency.
Wow, that is extremely generous of you, I hope I didn't take up too much of your time! I was definitely not expecting anyone would put something like this together, that is amazing to me.
Thanks, I will give this a spin as soon as I'm back in the office!
Sooo am a program manager and STRUGGLE with this sorta stuff like do I use planner with to do lists but then they're under a million buckets and how do I keep track etc. I've not had ANY formal project management training like Prince/waterfall etc and am not in the tech space but something like your spreadsheet looks awesome!!! Would it be OK if I downloaded and gave it a go with using it??
To be fair, I don't have any formal project management training either. For me it's more looking at data constraints and saying, if you want to track X, Y, and Z, here's a way to avoid double entry and leverage the things Excel can do.
Please use it if it helps you! I put it out in the world for that reason :) If you have questions, feel free to message me.
Edit to add: this spreadsheet is pretty focused on the original constraints that the OP put forward, so it might or might not fit with your needs. I'd take a look at Kanban as a pretty simple and effective system for small teams. The basics are that you prioritize the tasks and tackle the highest priority things first. Tasks are usually tracked in a grid (a wall and sticky notes work great if you are physically colocated), with columns being status like Todo, in progress, blocked, done and rows ("swimlanes") used to group related tasks. It's a continuous flow with fewer rituals vs. scrum, which has fixed sprints.
The hardest part for me is not tracking the work being done but making estimates and predictions about future work. I hate doing estimates because you're always wrong, but people want targets and numbers to track, and that seems to be where things end up. IMO that time could just be spent working, but I usually don't get much traction with "less management" from managers.
Honestly, I kinda disagree. I think his planning strategy is EXTREMELY common in his kind of environment. I basically read this and thought "yep, been there, had the same problem" except I don't even want a planning system that includes timelines because that'll just be another thing we blow up.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much attempt at helping the smaller business market. Most planning software is designed assuming you're following common practices with the team size and dedication to boot. I have the top level of the company walk into my office at any given moment and shuffle everything I'm doing. I'd love to elegantly show them "here's what i'm working on, where would you like this in the hierarchy" but it's not an easy thing to do with the current systems because, well, they assume you don't have that problem.
I've made a pretty good career out of being able to handle tech and business issues for small and mid sized companies that pull in a LOT of money, but aren't angling to handle issues in the way these systems think you should.
Would it be nice if they converted? Probably (i think there's some upsides to this way of doing things but clearly a bunch of downsides), but it's not going to happen because the top of the company doesn't believe it should cost that much.
I think you're right, "you have a unusual planning strategy with respect to the way these tools are normally used by enterprise customers, who are the ones product designers focus on" is probably more accurate. I do think there's probably a way to make Jira do this, but using Jira to do anything always feels like something I'll regret later. Same for zoho, etc.
Yeah not trying to be super picky, just something i've noticed is that there's really a huge market probably for middle sized business oriented software that just...doesn't exist from what I can see. MS/Google/all the other big players are just targeting their own, and by extension similar, environments, which is expected.
Just blows my mind how many systems I deal with on a day to day that expect you to have teams of people for processes/projects that one can manage as a side job if it's a smaller quantity.
You mentioned Trello - if you're not familiar, it does have a timeline view that might meet your needs. As a product, Trello is one of the best--designed project management tools I've worked with, and the Slack, Jira, and other integrations are very much worth the time to set up. You can add as much or as little detail to each tile as you prefer.
I tried the timeline view way back when it was in beta but looking at it again they have definitely changed how it works, this might be a good solution, thanks!
Checkout Microsoft Planner, it's like a simple project. You can have tasks within it, assign to people, use buckets for categorization and timeline. Can have chats with it. Works best with a teams channel.
I use it for my teams projects and for the bigger ones I use project.
I'll definitely check it out, it kind of looks like a trello/kanban-like and we already have access to it in o365. I didn't know this was a thing, not sure if that says something about my google-fu or Microsoft's marketing efforts 😆
Nah their marketing isn't great. I only found it by accident lol
This is SO CLOSE to what I need, the only issue is I can't move multiple cards at once, or change one and that changes the dates of the subsequent ones. So close!
There's supposedly changes coming to planner this year(like 1st qtr tops I believe), but I don't recall if some of these features are present. I know your pain. Blows my mind they'll make tools like this without simple "mass edit" features. You also can export your plan...but not import it into planner...which is fucking wild to me.
Then you might actually want to use project online since it has dependencies, but I still don't think multiple cards move at the same time on the board.
Might just be there isn't a perfect solution for your use case but perhaps you can get closer enough.
Sometime in the nearish future project online and planner will get merged.
It sounds like you might benefit from a kanban approach...Notice i said "might" and also said "approach", and not a specific tool. Others have mentioned trello and Ms Planner, and for me they really are really good for kanban, and in fact, in my opinion they're really great at general ToDo/task managament - separate of projects and separate of kanban. That being said, before you committ to a tool, would be good to ensure you and your team would be comfortable with a partoicular approach...Not just agile vs waterfall, etc...but, i mean in general. Could an excel do what you need? Very likely yes...and maybe you can keep using an excel to establish a good approach...then when everyone is bought into a particular "way of working", then can be in better position to pick an appropriate tool.
I'm going to push for you to really consider the kanban approach - i'm totally biased of course...so please take with a big grain of salt. I should clarify, that i do NOT suggest to adopt kanban to the letter. My opinion is that any and all project managament methodoligies are taken way too serious, and become religious fundamentalist things that people must adhere too or die...I say, pick and choose only the good parts from various approaches for what best suits you and your team, and toss out the rest of each methodoly that does not help you/your team. Kanban - here i go again trying to sell! - seems to wokr well if used very loosely because it helps techies see what's in the works at a glance, and it helps non-techies get a "dashbaord" view also of whats in the works...buyt, again, i suggest kanban in the loosest way that helps you, and not prescribes inflexible religouis ceremonies. Maybe talk to your team and run a mini workshop to play with fake tickets, fake projects...to see if they think it will work for them too. I hope that helps!
We do use trello for project overview (very much a birds eye view, not meant to contain any detail about the development of the project), but it doesn't work well on a sliding timescale. I tried trellos timeline this morning and it is VERY close to what I need, it just doesn't handle moving one card and propagating that change to all subsequent cards and I can't modify multiple cards at once so changing the timeline is a huge burden. Maybe there's a powerup or some way to manage this but I don't think this (or basically anything) is designed for my particular use case.
For now we're using a gantt chart and tracking interruption separately but it's not ideal.
I wish I had more time, I'd just make it myself 😆
I get ya now. Well, at least you're well-versed in your scenario, so know what does not work - which is important to know/learn. :-) Chin up, and good luck! :-)
Interesting use case! Have a peek at https://planimatic.com.
It's the only timeline tool I know of with proper "collapsing" of timespans.
I have not heard of this before, I'll take a look! Thanks
Oohh thanks for asking this q - I saw the spreadsheet and might see if I can steal/borrow it! Im not in tech but program management and have the same issue. Planner looks good until I can't get all my to-dos in one place but could just be a user side of things too!! Interested to hear what might work best! Lots of my stuff ends up being long term changes that need to happen but then 'sprints' in between as well.
Have you tried a Kanban board? I find it an easy way to display deliverables and where they are at on a timeline. mindmeister.com Is a great option
I'll check mind meister out, though we do use trello as kind of a kanban board for our projects (as in we're doing x and y project, z project is pending, etc) but that's for a really high POV of our commitments to other depts, it's not really to track each project individually.
Trello just isn't good enough for my specific purpose on a time scale, otherwise it's got the simplicity and readability I want. I described my grievances with it in another reply but in short moving cards are only done one at a time and that wouldn't be good enough for this particular use.
All projects management systems start with the assumption that there is only one project being worked on and everyone is working on it.
Sounds like you need more of a time tracking system where you book your time against different projects. Some can integrate into projects management systems and adjust timelines based on work performed.
This comment may go a little against the spirit of tildes simply in that I don’t have time to unpack ‘why’, but the tool we have moved to at my shop is https://www.aputime.com/
We have lots of chaos and interruptions and for us APUTime is indistinguishable from magic.
You might be able to hack a burndown chart to be helpful. You have a task for color theming, and you can create three dummy sub-tasks for color theming (one for each day estimated). For each day you work on color theming, you can complete one of those sub-tasks. If another project pops up, you can add it to consideration for the burndown chart (which should make the chart go up on that day) and mark it as complete whenever it's completed.
This should give you a graph showing progress on your color theming project, including delays from other things you work on. Lots of software should show which tasks were added/completed at inflection points on the graph for visibility to management.
Does that make sense?