Ooooh – Monday Climb Down!
So the good news is that Monday.com now DOES include Gantt charts. I have no idea how much was due to my article and how much was due to lots of other people also asking for them, but either way, they have changed their view from “Gantt charts are old fashionied and not worth it” (their actual headline was “We don’t need No Gantt charts where we’re going”) – to “Actually we think they are really good, at least most of the time”
They have publised a really GOOD article all about Gantt charts here: https://monday.com/blog/project-management/everything-you-want-to-know-about-gantt-charts/
In some ways I don’t really care about Monday.com and what they think, after all it’s a free country and there’s software for everyting out there, Gantt charts or not. But AGILE generally does annoy me because of their constant insinuation that proper project management is old fashioned and has been replaced by agile – “you don’t need to bother with all that planning stuff any more, it’s time consuming and inflexible, just use Agile instead”.
I think Monday.com started as an Agile tool, so their dislike of Gantts was part of the agile world, and they were simply talking the Agile language inorder to sell software to the Agile world – so it’s great to see that it’s not just me saying that Agile isn’t the asnwer, you HAVE to plan things, at least a little bit.
Maybe Monday are trying to cover both bases, and it’ll be interesting to see if they can do that. I guess there’s no reason why a piece of software CAN’T be useful for both Agile people and proper project managers who need cirtical paths and Gantt charts. Although in marketing terms it’ll be a tricky knife edge to walk, since both sides dislike each other so much!
And will Monday be able to do both well, or end up doing neither very well. I don’t know. That’s another question. But at least they now DO have Gantt charts, and that’s great.
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My Original Post:
I read this and it annoyed me A LOT
read it, and then:
here is my reply to their various statements, as quoted as followsā¦..
āMeeting deadlinesāgood. Planning visuallyāgood. Successfully building the Hoover Damāgoodā.
Exactly!
āWe have a lot of respect for Mr. Gantt, and believe that if youāre planning to build another Hoover Dam, using a Gantt chart might make a whole lot of sense. But most of us are not building the Hoover Dam or mobilizing for war. (At least we really hope not.)ā
This is disingenuous and slippery. Of course weāre not mobilising for war, but the real question is whether we are building something large or something small. If itās reasonably complex then something simple like Monday will not be enough, we need a proper project plan with a critical path and some resource planning, ie a Gantt chart. If itās small then fine, itās hardly a project and Iām not interested.
āThereās a huge misconception that in order to be more productive and achieve great things, we need to become masters of project management.ā
No, itās not a misconception, itās true. How weād all love to find a magic easier way but sorry guys, understanding some concepts, and planning, and real work have to be done if you want to achieve great things.
āYou donāt manage projects, you only manage peopleā ā what utter rubbish! Thereās cost, quality and time, and cost includes people and other resources. Yes you do need to manage your people, but thereās a lot more to PM than that. Like estimating, planning for risk, dependencies, critical paths, adapting to changes, making sure the reviews happen, etc. Which all require having a plan. Itās well known that management involves managing the task and the people, ask John Adair or Blake & Mouton. Itās not an either/or, itās both.
āGantt charts manage tasks and projects. People are a resource, a side effect, a secondary consideration no, just one of many important consideration
– for example, how many workers do you need to build a tunnel?
Reasonable question if you want to get it built!
The focus is always on the task and project at handā.
Fine
Then they insert the most horrible and bad Gantt chart Iāve ever seen, in order to say that all Gantt charts are bad:
Because it wouldnāt help their case if they showed a normal one would it?
āBecause theyāre focused on projects and not people, Gantt charts can become extraordinarily complex. You get lost in a web of hierarchies, dependencies, and endless subtasks, and totally lose sight of the bigger pictureā. Only a BAD Gantt chart is like this. I recommend a high level plan with maximum 25 tasks, and then sub Gantts, again max 25 tasks, for how youāll do each part. Not complicated, not getting lost, not endless.
āMany people complained that they had become slaves to Gantt charts, endlessly working to update and maintain the complex web of interdependencies and subtasksā.āSlavesā in that you have to keep to the project plan because you have a boss and a deadline? ā sorry snowflakes, but YES. āSlavesā in that the Gantt charts take ages? ā not true. They take on hour to make and then 5 minutes a week to update. I can show you this is you want. This āslaveā thing is disingenuous exaggeration, and simply not true.
āRather than making life easier, working with Gantt charts and other traditional project management methods simply created more work, headaches, and stressā.
Except that they DID build the Hoover dam, Apollo rockets, every bridge, every oil rig, every highway, every ship, every tunnel, every skyscraper, IN THE WORLD. And they are continuing to.
āWhatās everyone on your team working on? Whoās busy and whoās not?ā
Only a Gantt chart can tell you this. You could pull the data out and present it as a diary view, sorted by date or person,but where is the data from? The only way you can know who is needed where is from the original Gantt.
āSo what are the key differences between a Gantt chart and the monday.com timeline?
- The timeline focuses on people, not tasks or projects so you can no longer see the dependencies, you canāt see WHY the task has to be done then, how much float it has, if any, and what happens if you donāt do it then
- The timeline is super flexible, without any metadata or dependencies to maintain ā ah, flexibility. Yes a Gantt chart can super-easily be changed as well, though you donāt want to make too many, it super-annoys customers.
- You can always see the big picture of whoās working on what just like on a Gantt chart
- It forces you to āget realā with your plan, rather than planning in a vacuum ā huh? I think they mean that network diagrams are made without taking into account resource requirements, which is correct. Itās at the Gantt stage that we then consider resources. It worked for the hoover dam etc, so in what way is a Gantt chart not “getting real”??
- Itās intuitive and a great asset for first-time managers = it avoids the hard business of actually learning a real skill thatās a little bit complex and scary at first
- It has powerful features for expert project managers to dive deeper and dissect ā like what?? It doesn’t even have dependencies FFS!!
right, I’m going to lie down in a dark room now
or maybe listen to THIS as an antidote….
PS – get my online PM course from udemy for only Ā£10
Mochamad Aris Zamroni says
transpose the chart, i.e. make the vertical axis as time axis.
it will make the chart more compact and readable