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

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by stevend1994

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

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

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

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

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

[Mongai]

We are blessed to have a plotter.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

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

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.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by stevend1994

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.

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.

[Conor Ryan]

Originally Posted by annie1939

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

Ann

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

[Mongai]

I'm having fun with this flowchart.

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Mongai

I'm having fun with this flowchart.

Save the trees.

[sanddrag]

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?

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

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?

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

[Jim Schaddelee]

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.

[Bill_B]

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.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

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?

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

[Mongai]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

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?

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

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

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

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.