[Gllug] gantt chart drawing program?

[Vidar Hokstad]

On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 23:45, Simon Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Stig Brautaset wrote:
> 
> > Do you share my housemate's view that a gantt chart is vital? If so, I
> > guess for my basic needs I can draw one up in gnumeric or directly in
> > LaTeX.
> 
> Some folks argue that you need gantt charts to manage projects but some of
> the best project managers I've ever worked with do perfectly well with
> paper and some todo lists.

When we rolled out the .name TLD, the project managers initially used
gantt charts extensively. What we found, however, is that there's a 
scaringly high percentage of people that simply don't get gantt charts -
when communicating timelines other departments we found that even after
explaining gantt charts to people multiple times, it still didn't sink
in.

So we ended up using a list of milestones and todo lists for each
milestone instead when communicating outside the department.

In one of our current projects I use MrProject for myself, and create
tasks lists for the team members, and even though I send out the
MrProject file as well, most people prefer to use the task lists..

If people understand or expect gantt charts they're great, but you're
absolutely right that you don't need them, and sometimes you'll need
to present things differently because the charts just confuse people...

> I sometimes find the ability to link tasks together to see dependencies is
> quite useful for getting the feel of a project but I rarely use project
> tools to actually manage a project as they're just too cumbersome for the 
> types of projects I work on.

I currently use MrProject, and it works reasonably well, but only
because I hack my way around a few limitations by abusing the
dependency system and because it outputs to XML so I can manipulate
the file easily to extract info for use elsewhere... I think I'd go
insane if I'd had to use a proprietary tool where I couldn't customize
stuff here and there.
 
Vidar



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