Gantt chart

[Tennentslager]

I'm setting up a new office for 14 and need a planning tool.

I can get Microsoft Project for 55 squids...Is it any good?

Is there a free program that will help for this task.

To be honest I can do it using pencil and paper but want something that I can use in a grant submission that will look more slick and professional.

 

[PeterW]

MSProject is the defacto standard sadly for most projects now - it's not great at some of the more complex stuff but good for basic project planning and tracking. 

If it's just for a funding app then if you have excel you can use this 

http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-gantt-chart.html

If you want to use it for ongoing management then ganntpro or something similar is also free

 

 

[SteamyTea]

A lot of it depends on the nature of your business and the organisational skills of the office manager/administrator.

And the motivation of the staff.

I used to just use lists of what needed doing and trusted my staff to do what was needed in the easiest manner for them.

[Jeremy Harris]

I'd keep it as simple as you possibly can, and avoid anything that needs a lot of upkeep.  Project planning tools are OK, but there are really only two key things you, as a manager, need to be able to pull out of them quickly.

The first is that you need to know that you have captured every single key activity, quantified its resources, dependencies and timing and entered it into the tool.

The second is that you want to know instantly which activity, or activities, are on the critical path, so you can direct resources where they are needed most.

Simple is best, even for really big projects.  I was the programme manager for a £1.382bn "project" that had thousands of activities and hundreds of people working on it.  I managed that (successfully, I like to think) using two key bits of information.  One was "does the expenditure right now look about right for where we are?", the other was "what are the five top risks of failure for the programme?".

Crazy as it might seem, I was appointed to manage this programme with no project management experience at all.  I was a scientist who'd been promoted away from the bench and into management, crazy, because the promotion was on the basis of scientific achievement, not management ability - I had none.................

Anyway, because I didn't know any better I decided that if I concentrated on accurately identifying risk and putting my effort into putting resource into reducing the most critical risks each week, the chances were that things would run effectively.  As it happened they did, colleagues managing other large programmes thought I was some sort of guru and I was asked to give presentations on "risk focussed management".  I'm tempted to say that it was all management bullshit, but I'm still inclined to the view that this was a good approach.

It's hard to beat a white board on the office wall for the scale of management you're looking at, and it's also hard to beat the simplest form of spreadsheet you can come up with to manage cost.  If it were me I'd have a system where one white board had a list of risks, and on which every single person had an equal right to add risks.  I'd get these collated in order of severity, probability and impact and review them very regularly.  What you'll probably find is that early risk mitigation will reduce both your operating cost and your failure rate on jobs.

Finally, don't get seduced by project management tools and their features.  I still use a method I was taught back in the late 70's when I was working on the Stingray torpedo development programme.   It was the system that was created to manage Polaris, the program evaluation review technique (PERT).  It can easily be hand drawn on a white board, it's easy to see the critical path and I find the concept of activities having an earliest start, latest finish, dependencies on other activities completing and an estimated period of time and resource level for completion, an easy one to grasp.  It's not fashionable, probably because it's as easy to do on a white board as it is to use a bit of software.  It has one overwhelming advantage, and that is that even someone with no experience of project management can look at it and see where the critical path lies and where resources must be committed to keep things on track.  GANTT charts are, IMHO, a complete PITA, as they are regularly frigged to show what the presenter wants you to see, they don't naturally show you the critical path and I've yet to find them to be useful for anything other than office wall paper.

 

[IanR]

On 6/11/2016 at 10:20, Tennentslager said:

Is there a free program that will help for this task.

 

 

Within Google Drive there's a free 3rd part app called "Gantter for Google Drive"

 

It has very similar work flow and features to MS Project, and you can Import and Export to MS Project as well as other formats. The added benefit is having the Master file accessible across devices and the ability to collaborate with other users, without having to install software.