Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

I posted a Gantt chart of mine a while back for FRC team 935 (RaileRobotics). It's amazing how much I have learned about project management in the past six months. This particular chart focuses on every activity we will perform during our scheduled build season, so milestones aren't grouped to each individual project for that purpose. Most of these tasks have assigned resources, which brings up a point that is very humorous yet daunting: there are ALWAYS key people that need to be over-allocated. :D

This monstrosity took me a lot of time to make, and I am always adding to it. I used Microsoft Project 2010, which our team is very grateful to have. I really would like to see what other people have come up with organization-wise, and I don't care what program you use, either. Show us your plans for build season!

Link: http://i.imgur.com/OnOlU.gif

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

The Cha-Cha Slide does a great job describing most project management.

"Slide to the right!"

:ahh:

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

This is awesome!

We're using Gantter.com for ours this year - in the past, only one mentor had a Microsoft Project license, making it difficult for students to track progress, make adjustments, etc. (Dropboxing PDF copies wasn't cutting it). Gantter has really slick Google Apps integration, which the whole team already uses, so sharing and collaboration are seamless.

So you're saying there's a real reason they play it at regionals when they fall behind schedule? :P

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

I'm trying out tomsplanner.com. One advantage is you can post a link to it for everyone on the team to see. Easy to use too. Haven't tried multiple concurrent editors though, but it does have live updating.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

And here I was just about to make our whole Gantt Chart in a google spreadsheet! Thanks for the program suggestions! Tom's planner looks really great and intuitive.

-Anna

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Our team uses Gantt Project, although that's mainly because when we first started using Gantt Charts, it was the first link that showed up in Google. :o

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Also take a look at Zoho Project. That's what I plan on using this season.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

We use dot project. Everyone can login and access the milestones, though I find that not everyone understands the charts. Dot project will email when tasks are complete or updated to everyone involved in that task.

http://www.dotproject.net/

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Nice :) I was just going to make a new thread for "Project Management Software" ideas (maybe consider renaming this thread?). Anyway, here is a list of mine that I've come across. Need I mention that I have not used any of the ones below :P

dotProject - My host offers it as a one click.
ProjectPier - I'm installing this as I type this, to try it out. It has a nice web GUI.
Collabtive - I'm also going to be installing this. It has a super simple GUI that looks nice and doesn't appear to come with many advanced features, just the critical ones to keep it simple.
qdPM - A web-based PM.
I will try to remember to post which one I like better (ProjectPier or Collabtive - I'm guessing Collabtive as of right now) after I try them out.

There are also a few more ones to try from this blog post as well about open source PM software.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Yes, that's why you've got to "criss-cross" your fingers before you slide to the left... Because nothing ever slides to the left.

(In real life. The planned schedule always slides left.)

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Does anyone have a good one that allows the sending of text message updates?

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

The Cheesy Poofs offer a beautiful Gantt chart from the 2012 season, here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?k...5A&output=html

The Google Spreadsheet approach lacks sophisticated project management features, but I find it to be very effective at conveying information that is easy to read and understand.

Our team hasn't made our own Gantt chart yet but we are going to this year. Thanks for starting this thread.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

There was once a great gantt chart on the usfirst.org website. Circa 2006 at least. Anyone have a copy of it?

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

There are many examples of the time line style project management tools above. They work fine for the top down. What do teams do for the bottom up? In other words how do you handle the bottom up. The assignment of all the micro tasks and their management. Last year I tried the Agile scrum methods to the nightly build tasks. I think it worked well for the first 2 weeks and then things fell apart. We had one crisis after another and the stress built up. I blame my self. I stopped driving it as the task master and became too reactionary to the current crisis of the night. Micro planning fell apart. I got some feed back and intend to go at it again this season.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Here is chart from FIRST. It is in the team resources section.
http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...0Timeline3.pdf

Ann

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

I'm curious what kind of updates you want a Gantt chart program to text message.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Every failed milestone of course.... to every team member!

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

We are blessed to have a plotter.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Well, I wasn't so much thinking Gantt Chart as much as general project management tools, which the thread seemed to sort of be heading in the direction of.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

For general task management - we find Trello invaluable and incredibly user-friendly. We have over a dozen boards set up, for each of our committees, the mentors, and team leaders. Students have access to the boards for the groups they're a part of, receive email notifications when they are assigned a task, can easily delegate, add details, and mark doing or complete, and there are great mobile apps. For us, this will go hand-in-hand with a Gantt chart this season.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

I could have sworn I checked the team resources section!
Very much rep for you! Thank you!

Also, Moe did some great work on these charts available in excel and microsoft project

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

I'm having fun with this flowchart.


Not to discourage you at all, Gdeaver, but a friend of mine brought up an important point about a high school robotics team. They don't consist of trained professionals. The differences between trained adults and wonky students can make a large gap. I can confirm this, being a student myself. :p

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Save the trees.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Maybe I'm just too simple but I've always found the time spent planning, formatting, and reviewing such charts to be better spent planning, manufacturing, and testing robot designs. Any minute I spend on such a chart is a minute later that I'll reach my deadlines because I wasn't making progress toward the goals. Anybody share my opinion on these?

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Nothing stopping you from doing it all before the build season begins :) Anyhow, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Here is a link to a great project manager and its free I believe for groups up to thirty. www.asana.com/ after using this I got rid of big messy charts. It is web based but there is a free app.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

wonky students? I admire the creation of an adjective to replace previously complex descriptive strings as they pertain to adolescent behavior. I'm quite sure that adherence to a formal GANTT/PERT formulation is a very low probability in our case at least. I'm more interested in the introduction of the concepts of task planning, critical path, resource allocation, etc..

I intend to make a list of tasks that appear on whatever plans I can find. I will present that list to the team along with the comment that they show the things other teams are doing. I hope I can couple this with a polite way to say if you're not willing to participate in at least one of them, please stay home and avoid distracting those of us who'd like to have a chance at success this year. (Of course, I would allow the addition of suitable task entries to the list as long as there are resources to do them.)

My thanks in advance to all who have shared or will share their list of tasks.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

This is assuming everyone in the group has some hive mind so that they all know what is important and what should be worked on, at all times. As well as you, and everyone else, never working on the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I'm sure groups work just like that ;)

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

I would love to work on robot plans off season full time, but this flowchart explains why we can't do that right away.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Valid point. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea altogether. I'm just opposed to personally spending time on it because I wear too many hats as it is. I think my students should give it a try. I'll get them on it.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

My team seems to have taken to Trello very quickly.

This will be the first year that we will be hitting the build season with a proper, full-team organizational application. Still testing the waters, but we needed some kind of communication system better than FB or a website forum.

And unlike FB, I can require all members to join in.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

One of most important tools for any project is a schedule. A Gantt Chart is a great way to get organized. At work I use Project or Primavera, but for FIRST excel or a Google Doc works wonders. It doesn't have to complicated to be useful, sometimes high level is all you need.

There's a couple of factors that can be even more important than what type of schedule. One is associating an appropriate amount of work to a given task. Things will rarely go quicker than expected, so account for that too. If you don't know how long something will take, allow for some time to learn the factors you don't know. Build in time to practice, code, test, adjust and sleep... Another factor is to hold sub teams accountable to their tasks and compromise as needed.

I believe, if more teams went through this exercise, it would drive them to simpler design choices and more competitive solutions. In Exploding Bacon's first two seasons we made significant design sacrifices in order to allow sufficient driver practice and autonomous programming. It resulted in an a championship division finalist and division win. In both cases the schedule made the decisions for us. In the years we stretched, and missed dates, we struggled.

Robot in 3 days recently posted an example of a simplified 2013 Gantt Chart here.

It was originally developed in Goodle Docs and shared amongst team members there.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Dan,
What's the 'Test kit and and data collection' item on your chart?

Ann

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Scratched my head on this one for a while.

I believe it's main purpose is to test the hardware, electrical and software components that come in the kit. This was from a time where the kit components where a bit more surprising then they are today. It would be more relevant if the GDC throws us a curve ball. The task also can apply to sensors, software, electronic components as well.

We had a bad habit of disappearing into our cad rooms without thoroughly investigating what was in the kit, how it worked, and it's general limits of operation. Adding the task ensured we at least thought about it before we checked it off.

Re: Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!
 

Dan, thanks for posting this. A good deal of tonight's team meeting was spent talking about scheduling from both a high level and a very detailed level. I'm going to share your successes and struggles with my team.

One of the hard parts about trying to move industry tools into FIRST is that not only do we have adolescents that rightfully have other priorities but our most experienced members leave each year! That body of group knowledge just doesn't stay the way you'd like it to.