Gantt Charts Yay, Smartsheet Nay
I have gone on record about my distaste for Smartsheet, our introduction to the fabulous world of Gantt Charts. Though I found the experience of using that tool very frustrating, I’m willing to give organizational charts another chance.
Smartsheet has a nice clean look and was relatively intuitive, but there were a few roadblocks that will put me off from ever using it again.
For one thing, you can’t schedule a deadline during the weekend, a friendly concession to those wanting a work/life balance. However this is a world where projects are done during strange hours. There are going to be times (I hope) when I’m working on my own projects during my free time and during those times I will probably be working during weekends.
More troublesome is the problem of stacking deadlines. Like a house of cards or a poorly constructed Jenga tower, the whole thing falls apart when you pull out one piece. The whole architecture of Smartsheet is meant to keep track of the tasks you have to complete before you can move on to the next one. But let’s say the deadline for one task changes and you adjust your chart to reflect that fact: the rest of the chart architecture stays in place, only now it’s running on an incorrect timeline. It means you need to know the exact layout of a project before you start, and how often is that the case (really, I want to know)? I think it’s more likely you’re going to have a rough outline that will change and evolve as the project does.
Still, I’m open to the idea of giving Gantt Charts another chance. We certainly could have used one for our term project. It would have made keeping track of deliverables and assigned tasks a whole lot easier, giving people a hard deadline to aim for. I can see how they would be useful as an organizational tool, especially for a team. However, I’d like to see what other kinds of products are out there that offer a better experience. I may even be willing to pay for it.