I’ve been looking at Gantt chart functions and have been going round and round on whether Gantts need to be interactive or not, and if so how interactive. The main benefit provided by a Gantt chart is that it gives the people involved with a project an easily understandable visual representation of the project’s tasks over a timeline. It can be particularly useful when planning the project because you can see where the tasks fall on the calendar and you can see how the tasks relate to each other.
At a minimum a Gantt chart shows the task titles, start date and target date (planned completion date) in a calendar/timeline view. Other information that can be displayed are dependencies between tasks, resources assigned to the tasks, budgets, actuals and additional dates. I’m sure that there are other data elements that a project manager or project stakeholder might want to see in this view, and adding that data should be relatively easy to do. Of course, the end user should have the ability to choose which data is shown on the chart and in what format.
The question is, ”is this enough?” Does the chart have to be interactive? When I say interactive, I’m referring to the ability to update the tasks from the chart itself. I’m quite sure that interactivity is a nice feature to have, but is it something that is a core function that you have to have? If task management functions such as date changes are simple and powerful, does the chart need to support management functions also, or can it simply be a presentation view?
What are your experiences with Gantt charts? Do you primarily use them as a presentation medium for yourself or others? Do you make changes from the chart? Would you if you could? Would you be satisfied if you couldn’t make changes from the chart, but you could make changes easily and quickly from the task list itself? If you do need to make changes from the chart, which changes are must haves and which are nice to haves?
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