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

[Mongai]

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.

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

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Mongai

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!

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

"Slide to the right!"

[dcarr]

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.

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

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

"Slide to the right!"

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

[JCharlton]

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.

[ZipTie3182]

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

[Ankit S.]

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.

[agartner01]

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

[Chris_Elston]

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/

[runneals]

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

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.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by dcarr

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

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.)

[Steven Donow]

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

[CatHerder]

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.

[Conor Ryan]

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

[Gdeaver]

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.

[annie1939]

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

Ann