Thursday 1 March 2007

I hate Gantt charts


Truly. I really hate them. You might as well show me something upside down in Ukranian

It's like me showing a massive content audit spreadsheet to a client as a sitemap or something.

Just tell show me the number of days i have, what i have to deliver and when.

interesting discussion about it on the mega clever tuftey-bear site

Normally i take the gantt chart, count the number of days, then just do a single line with my days/activities in an excel spreadsheet, then add the other peeps on the project in successive lines, so i can see what i'm actually doing. It suddenly raises loads of things that a gantt chart normally misses out, like holidays, prep for meetings etc.

Anyway. That's boring.

Basically, i hate. hate. hate. Gantt charts.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

i'm with you. they make me anxious.

David Carruthers said...

can'tt Charts
cunt charts
gaintt shits

Unknown said...

hrm... i don't mind them. In fact, I kind of miss them in BaseCamp and software like that.

But then... I was a Project Manager in a past life, so that might explain it.

David Carruthers said...

you're mad.

They're useful for planning tasks, not communicating that planning. (apart from to other project managers)

:¬b

Olly Wright said...

The problem with gantt charts is they assume that the future will be how we expect it to be. The reality is that further than about one week out, we have no clue. No clue at all. None in the slightest. This makes a gantt chart no more than a projection of a project managers fantasy. Now I'm all for fantasy, but not when it comes to deadlines.

I get an allergic physical reaction when shown a gantt chart. I start to shake and cough, like the old man in that book by Nabokov.

zamroni said...

I don't like it too, therefore I made new charting method.
I transposed the regular Gantt chart, i.e. putting time axis as vertical axis. It creates more compact and readable chart.
You can see some example in https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vertical-gantt-chart-mochamad-aris-zamroni/