Last week I worked with some great people to plan two of their projects
They were clever and knowledgeable, but the planning really did add one more dimension – control. No, two more dimensions, control and communication.
Here’s a picture (bits removed for confidentiality) of the first project
first we did the critical path plan using post-its – lot of arguing but that means it wasn’t entirely clear, so that was time well spent!
then we did the Gantt chart using Excel. Wow this is a complicated project – thank goodness we’ve got it under control now!
What we learned:
you CAN’T do this in your head / heads! Too much to remember, things will get forgotten, and too hard to know who else is doing what and when. Once you’ve got the Gantt chart you can see everything, nothing will get forgotten, and everyone knows who is responsible for what. And we know we can definitely do it!
Before we made the chart they had an Agile Kan-Ban board – basically just a list of jobs to do, with no visibility of what depends on what, what needs to be done first, what’s the critical path, etc… This Gantt chart is SO much better!
AND – for future times when they do the same thing again (they do it each year) they can use the same chart again….
The second project revealed something really important – it was going to take longer than we had. So we had to crash it (money up / quality down / lots of overlapping) in order to make it quicker.
Thank goodness we discovered NOW that it need to be speeded up, well in advance, rather than finding out later that we weren’t going to make it. Now it’s all going to be fine….
I love Gantt charts
and my name is Chris
