No!
And here’s why
On a continuum:
Trello – great for listing tasks but that’s as far as it goes
Asana, Monday, Jira, Basecamp, ClickUp, Slack etc – great for team communication and for listing and sharing and transferring tasks (workflow) but no way are these proper PM tools. Then can show time lines or dates that have been assigned to tasks but that’s not the same as a Gantt chart. They don’t have a comprehension of critical paths, tasks, or float, and mostly don’t even do dependencies so if one thing goes late it affects others. Also no comprehension of resource levelling etc.
Microsoft Project – does everything but horrible to use. Also too clever for its own good, so if you change something it’ll change everything else, in ways that you can’t see, and using assumptions that may be wrong.
Wrike etc – full on PM systems that do everything but take years to learn and hours to update, and will still never be right because they don’t know everything, and enough small things change each week to upset their plans. A rough plan is better than a massive detailed one.
And the search for a perfect tool is futile anyway because….
YOU have to list the tasks
YOU have to estimate them
YOU have to decide on the dependencies
YOU have to tell it the start and/or finish dates
YOU have to make the crashing decisions – money up or quality down or overlap?
So the computer can only be a drawing tool at most.
Maybe a what-if tool for when you manually change things. And maybe a reporting tool that shows a summary of where all your projects are at.
Until I see something better I still like post-it notes (yes! paper ones!) on a whiteboard, followed by an excel Gantt chart. Good old excel. Everyone knows how to use it, it does what you tell it with no hassle, and it’s great for adding up money and people’s hours, both planned and actually used.
Stop looking for a magic answer that will do your projects for you, and use your own knowledge and judgement with simple tools like Excel to draw the pictures.
