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Color Coding

by Chris Carlson in New Release / Feature

This latest release now incorporates user selectable color coding of resources. This is the first integration of a series of color coding features which will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

color coded assignments 600x374 Color Coding

Thoughts on Color

We generally like Stephen Few’s and try to stick to his guidelines when we can. The short form of his advice is “Use Color Meaningfully and with Restraint.” With that in mind we asked our selves how can we use color to convey additional meaning in our Gantt Charts. So far we have come up with the following scenarios:

Color is helpful when used to:
- Code which resources are assigned to tasks
- Bring some tasks to the attention of the chart viewers
- Group tasks together into logical groups such as phases or internal/external

This latest release now supports color coding of the assignments in the resource view. Next will be resource dependent color coding of tasks in the Gantt Chart view along with color coding of individual tasks and groups of tasks.

Performance Improvement

We hope you notice an improvement in how Gantto has been performing over the last few weeks. We have been rolling out the juiciest performance optimizations we can find and have improved responsiveness by 50% or more for many user gestures.

As always, we love all comments or suggestions. Please drop me a line: chris@gantto.com

Work Calendar Editor

by Chris Carlson in New Release / Feature, UX

Gantto’s work calendar editor makes it easy to adjust the standard working hours for your project.

Quick Overview of the Work Calendar Editor

To edit your work calendar
– Open your project
– navigate to View->Work Cal
– edit, add, remove the default working times to your custom working times
– that is it, navigate back to whatever you were doing
work calendar editor 600x438 Work Calendar Editor

Work Calendar Editor Requirements

Up until now Gantto has assumed that the working times are 8am-12pm, 1pm-5pm Monday to Friday. While this works for a number of customers, we have gotten numerous requests to allow more flexible working times. Some people like to work on weekends, some define the work day from Sunday to Thursday, some people just like to work a lot more than 40 hours a week.

We set out to create a system for editing the work calendar which:
– Defaults to the existing behavior (8am-12pm, 1pm-5pm, M-F)
– Easy to create or edit, should take less than 60 seconds for most people
– Is flexible enough to handle the customer calendar requests thus far
– Is precise to 15 minute intervals

Work Calendar Editor How To

For a quick example, lets assume you want to schedule a death march, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.
First, Open your project and navigate to View->Work Cal
You should see the default work calendar:
work calendar editor 600x438 Work Calendar Editor

From here simply resize the working times to span the ranges you are looking for, lets assume we want to work from 10am to 11pm with a 1 hour video game break:
work calendar death march 600x441 Work Calendar Editor

That is it, the work calendar has now been updated, the project now assumes that you are working 7 days a week. So now a task dependent on one which finishes on Friday will start Saturday instead of Monday. Also tasks modeled as taking 70 hours of effort will now finish in 1 week instead of almost two.

We would love to hear your comments, suggestions and requests about this work calendar editor or any other aspect of how Gantto is working for you. Please drop me a line at chris@gantto.com.

Resource Manager

by Chris Carlson in New Release / Feature

Today we release the first cut of Gantto’s resource manager. We are really excited about this new feature because it enables a completely new view of your project and easily highlights potential scheduling conflicts. (We are also really excited because this is one of our most requested features.)

TL;DR

Gantto can now do this:
gantto resourcechart end 600x222 Resource Manager

Use Case

We are looking to serve a few related use cases with this new capability:

  1. How can you quickly display what each individual of your team is working on at any one time?
  2. How can you quickly see which resources are scheduled over or under capacity?
    1. Once you have them identified, how can you easily make adjustments to the plan (hint: drag and drop)
Resource Manager Allocation Example

Lets start off with a simple schedule like the one below. Here Chris and Fed are working on two features, the Resource Manager and the Work Calendar:
gantto taskchart start 600x344 Resource Manager
This schedule looks simple enough, but what is not clear is that is actually has both Chris and Fed over allocated by 100%. To see this, we click View-> Resources and get this view:
gantto resourcechart start 600x223 Resource Manager
This view shows the tasks organized by the resources who are responsible for them. Here it is clear that both Chris and Fed have a number of tasks which overlap each other (i.e., they are doing two things at once.) Now that we have this insight, it is easy to return to the View->Data view and slide the summary for the Work Calendar over one week like this:
gantto taskchart end 600x344 Resource Manager
And the resulting resource chart looks like this:
gantto resourcechart end 600x222 Resource Manager
And now Chris and Fed are no longer over-allocated.

If life were only that simple icon smile Resource Manager As a consequence of solving the overallocation problem, the release of the Work Calendar is pushed out one week. The Gantt Chart and the Resource Chart help to motivate why that is. It is up to you to communicate that effectively to the stakeholders.

Resource Manager Add New Resource Example

It is also possible to add new resources in the resource view. Just click “Add New Resource”
gantto resourcechart add 600x295 Resource Manager
You have the option to list the full name as well as nicknames for each resource. (This makes rendering the resources on the views more compact and less cluttering.)
And now that we have this new wonderful QA resource, we can simple drag the testing tasks from Chris’ list to theirs:
gantto resourcechart drag 600x282 Resource Manager
And then we can drop the assignment into QA’s list:
gantto resourcechart drop 600x282 Resource Manager

Add Resources in Spreadsheet Mode

On a related note, if you work with a lot of resource allocation you should definitely check out our full spreadsheet view for your Gantt Charts. It makes it really easy to go down the list and add resources to each task:
gantto taskchart spreadsheet 600x283 Resource Manager

As ever we would love to hear what you think! Please do not hesitate to email me: chris@gantto.com with any comments, suggestions or bugs!

Diagramme de Gantt en ligne et en Français

by Chris Carlson in New Release / Feature

Gantto s’internationalise: Notre diagramme de Gantt en ligne est dorénavant disponible
Français. Environ les deux tiers de notre trafic est aux US et la langue étrangère
la plus fréquemment demandée est le français.

Qu’est-ce que cela signifie pour une application d’avoir une version Français?

  1. Notre application détecte automatiquement la préférence de langue du système d’exploitation
  2. Le menu devrait apparaît en Français
  3. Entrée de texte sont compatibles avec les caractères de l’orthographe Française

Malheureusement, personne chez Gantto ne parlent le français couramment. Si vous
remarquez des problèmes ou avez des suggestions pour de meilleures traductions,
merci de nous contacter a l’adresse suivante: support@gantto.com.

Lorsque nous sortons de nouvelles fonctionnalités, nous le faisons en
Anglais dans un premier temps, les versions traduites viendront dès que nous aurons assez de
feedback de nos clients pour nous assurer d’une version stable. Si vous le voulez
en français plus tôt, envoyez-moi un email et nous nous en occuperons au plus vite:
chris@gantto.com

Easier and Faster

by Chris Carlson in New Release / Feature, UX

It is now faster and easier to build a Gantt Chart Online in Gantto than on a whiteboard or free hand. Our automatic dependency creation system that lets you create cascades of independent or dependent tasks in just a few seconds. Combined with our interactive drag and drop features Gantto is the best way to brainstorm and maintain a schedule.

Auto-dependencies

First I select the tasks I want to cascade:
auto dependency select 600x146 Easier and Faster
Creating a cascade of dependent tasks is a single click of the connect button:
auto dependency connect 600x146 Easier and Faster
Want a cascade with no dependencies? Just connect them and then unconnect them again with another click:
auto dependency disconnect 600x148 Easier and Faster
Grouping tasks is now also a single click:
auto dependency group 600x168 Easier and Faster

Tool Tips

We officially have enough features that it takes a few minutes to look through them all and several of them are unique to Gantto. This week we have implemented tool tips to provide a helpful bit of info right where you need it. Just hover over a Gantto control for a few seconds and one will popup:
auto dependency tooltip 600x148 Easier and Faster

Read Only

Another common request is to make shared Gantto schedules appear more read only. Up to now, it was possible to locally change a read only schedule, but it was not possible to save it to the server. (We agree this was quick to implement, but confusing) Starting this week, read only schedules will let you change the way you view the data, but will not let you modify any of the data. Just as before, changes to the view are not saved to the server.

Small Task Shape

Some of you have commented on our new “Small Task Shape.” Aka, weird Batman thingy. One of the things that always bothered us about other Gantt Charts was that once the tasks were below a certain size, they would not longer render any of the controls. So our goal was to create a small task shape which would stay interactive. Unfortunately at the limit our task looks more like a Batman symbol than a task, so this week we remodeled it again.
From Bat:
gantto bat tasks Easier and Faster
To Task:
gantto short tasks Easier and Faster

As ever we love to hear feedback, good and bad. Please e-mail me at chris@gantto.com