We've been getting lots of helpful feedback from our beta users, and one question came up a few times: how do we plan a project?
That's actually a great question. While using the application may be very easy, it's not often clear, when faced with a blank slate, how to start planning a project.
So we made this short instructional video. It's three-minutes in length, but it tries to cover a lot. Not only how to get started, but also best practices and techniques we've been learning by using Gigantt ourselves.
The video is doubly awesome because it's self-referential. You'll have to see what that means yourselves...
This post is completely off-topic. It's not about project planning. It's about the best damn GPS navigation software out there today - Waze.
Waze is awesome because it uses information gathered from all its users' smart phones to learn where traffic is jammed and route drivers accordingly using the quickest route. But there's one thing I always miss when using Waze - it doesn't tell me where I can park. Sure, adding a parking lot layer over the map is sort of a solution. Many competing products do this. But in some places [cough]Tel Aviv![/cough] this is simply not enough because there are waaay too few parking lots.
So here's what Waze's next killer feature could be: crowd-sourced parking. As a user I would definitely pay money to know where the closest publicly available parking spot it. Waze could set up a whole economy of parking spots: when you leave a spot you "check out" with Waze. If you're looking for a parking spot you hit the P button and Waze directs you to the nearest one. Users could accumulate parking credits when they check out and another Waze user takes their place. I hope somebody there reads this. Anywayz, Gigantt ♥ Waze.
All you really need to know to get started with Gigantt is ENTER for a new task and INSERT for a new child task. But power users quickly become thirsty for more keyboard shortcuts, and Gigantt has one for every possible action. Gigantt's knowledgebase now contains a keyboard shortcut cheat sheet you can download and print.
Gigantt's Help web site is now up. It's in the form of a wiki. A true wiki; meaning anyone can edit it.
Right now it contains mostly articles explaining the existing features, keyboard shortcuts, FAQs, that kind of stuff. But I do welcome contributions from users.
Today, after way too many weeks of testing and improvements, Gigantt's Team Edition is live. You can finally assign tasks to people (or other resources) and enjoy Gigantt's smart goal-based task scheduling.
Here's what the new version looks like:
A few new things to notice. All of these tasks are assigned to Cosmo Kramer, as evident by the watermark on the bottom-left corner. It tells us that Kramer is in charge of this part of the plan, and that any new task created here will be assigned to him by default.
If we decide to add another task here and assign it to George Costanza, we'll see his name on the left of the task:
All the other tasks belong to Kramer - the default owner of tasks in this area - so there's no point in showing his name beside each and every task. That's why only George's name is shown.
To reassign a task just click on the left side-panel and you'll see this popup where you can select any team member:
You can also reach it with the keyboard - Tab will reach the button and Enter will open the panel.
The start & finish dates of each task is shown in the time-bar above:
There's now a wider range of estimates that you can choose for each task, including even a one-minute estimate (useful for check-lists). The estimate panel has an array of buttons so that estimating a task is just one click for ultra-fastness:
Important note: as part of the beta-ness of this version there's still no UI to add/remove members from your team. That's in the next version. No worries, though, just write to support@gigantt.com and we'll do it for you.
Should we invest time in infrastructure or focus on shipping the next big feature? Should the QA team work on "Product A" or "Product B"?
Managing a complex work plan that spans multiple projects and teams means always being able to decide what's more important. And there's always a decision to be made. Telling your development team to focus 35% of their time on one project and the rest on another is a sure recipe for both projects not finishing on time. Keep it simple, break the plan into smaller chunks and decide what's more important.
This is how Gigantt tackles prioritization. Instead of maintaining complex resource allocation schemes, users of Gigantt define goals and prioritize them. A goal in Gigantt is just any task in the work plan. When you mark a task as a goal, Gigantt analyzes the entire work plan and considers all the tasks that have to be completed for the goal to be reached. For you nerds, it's like a reverse DFS of the work-plan graph. Okay, enough nerd talk, let's see an example.
Kramerica Industries has two products: Widget and Cajiggre, and there's a work-plan for a few weeks ahead.
Jerry is in charge of Widget and Kramer is in charge of Cajiggre, and as long as that's the case there's not much to prioritize. Work happens independently and in parallel. Things become more interesting when there are shared resources between products. So let's throw George into the mix as QA Manager. George has to test each version of each product before it can be shipped, and there's only one George... Let's see how each product's plan looks now.
Jerry's plan looks OK. He does the development and George does the testing (and shipping) right after each version is finished:
But Kramer's plan has a few delays in it. For example, George is busy testing Widget 1.0 when he could be testing Cajiggre 2.0:
At which point a decision has to be made, which product is more important. Since Widget appears before Cajiggre in the work plan, Gigantt will automatically give it preference when assigning resources. Whatever appears on top is considered higher priority. This is true for simple tasks as well as for whole projects and it's the simplest way to prioritize in Gigantt. But what if Cajiggre 2.0 is actually a top priority for the company? We need finer-grained control over priorities, not just between products but also between individual versions of each one. We achieve this by marking all of the ship tasks as goals.
Just toggle the little star icon for every task that should be considered a goal:
If we then click on (prioritize) we see an ordered table of all the goals in our work plan:
If we drag "Ship 2.0" to the top, as the video below shows, all the tasks leading up to "Ship 2.0" get rescheduled so that "Ship 2.0" completes as early as possible.
Same thing can be done with individual tasks, not just entire versions of the product. Since a goal is defined as everything that must happen in order for a given task to finish it's entirely possible to define multiple goals in the same projects. Notice that goals can also overlap (share tasks).
first task is shared by both goals and thus has top priority (red)
Whenever there's any contention about a shared resource, managers can easily define any task as a goal and prioritize it to settle the dispute. They can also play around with priorities to see how much it effects the finish dates of each goal. Instead of allocating resources in advance to various teams and then fighting over who "owns" the lab this week, only goals are prioritized and everything else is derived from that. Prioritizing goals is less confrontational than prioritizing teams or entire products.
What I like best about Gigantt's goals is how clearly the organization's priorities are conveyed to the teams. It's hard to get confused by that table above. Everybody knows where their efforts should be focused.
