Product Review: Ganttic
This product review is about Ganttic, a resource planning software named after a project manager’s best friend, the Gantt chart. While the Gantt chart and I may not be besties, I was intrigued by Ganttic’s flexibility and large number of potential use cases, ranging from team calendar management to project management. Ganttic’s capabilities as a portfolio management tool reminded me of an amped up version of Microsoft Project. I hoped the “resource” management function would be less mystifying than Microsoft’s attempt and eagerly initiated my 14-day free trial.
People Management
One self-described use case for Ganttic is “general resource scheduling”—meaning that you can use Ganttic to see whether people are busy, supplies are available, or a conference room is booked. I personally adhere to the agile principle that you shouldn’t refer to people as resources—it’s way too impersonal. So I’ll refrain from doing that here.
To create your list of people, navigate to the tear drop icon on the left navigation panel. Adding new folks to the list was as simple as choosing the button labeled “add new” and typing the name. I was surprised to find that no additional information was required but then observed a blue button near the top of the page that offered an option to modify the data fields associated with this entry. Selecting this option presented a minimalist interface for creating your own customized data fields.
While I appreciate the concept of customization, I found myself wishing that the data table were prepopulated with a few common options to avoid having to build out the data fields entirely from scratch. Doing so could be time-consuming for large projects and would be a helpful guide for newer project managers who may be unsure what information to include. It would also be nice to have the option to edit available data fields when creating a new entry. I did appreciate being able to sort easily (unlike in Microsoft Project.) The filtering capability would also be useful once the list started to get long.
Ganttic offers a good visual representation of staff availability, which can be displayed as a percentage or number of hours of available time. Green bars indicate that the person is booked, while the blanks represent availability.
While I’m not a visual person, this view would work well for the Gantt chart aficionados out there. It could be a bit misleading that green, rather than red, denotes that someone is unavailable, but the percentage indicators help address this potential confusion and also serve as a guide for the visually impaired.
Should you choose to use Ganttic as a calendar management tool, the product helpfully offers either a one-way or a two-way sync with both Google and Microsoft Outlook.
Project Management
Ganttic again offers flexibility in how its users define projects—if you don’t want to use this view for traditional project management, you can also use it to manage people or products. Similar to Microsoft Project, you can also create tasks associated with the project(s) you create. Below are the tasks that I defined for my “Clean brook” project:
Once you’ve defined the project(s) you are managing, you can then navigate to the resource view to understand which people are assigned to which engagements. This view would be useful in a consulting environment where we’re constantly trying to figure out who has availability based on the projects they’re supporting, the level of effort they expend on each of their projects, and the start and end date of these engagements. In the sample below, I can see the unassigned hours for Anne, Marilla, Matthew, and Diana as well as the projects and tasks they are slated to support:
As with the people management capability, Ganttic gives you the option to create custom data fields to capture project details, although again some guidance might be beneficial for novices beyond the suggested examples. I created fields for project start date, end date, and account. A minor suggested improvement—the fields remained sorted in the order I entered them. Since I listed end date first, subsequent data entry required me to enter that information before entering the start date, and I didn’t see a way to modify that.
I also like that Ganttic recently added a Kanban view in addition to a list view for projects. More and more platforms are adding this capability, recognizing the need to manage the details of low-level tasks in addition to the big picture vision for project delivery. In practice, I found the Kanban view a little wonky. I expected to see the data fields serve as the basis for organizing the board views, and I couldn’t readily identify how to manipulate those views to sort the data.
Other Cool Features
A few other positives that stood out to me when using Ganttic:
You can easily manipulate the timeline to accommodate short-term scheduling needs as well as longer-term views suitable for executives. As someone who has spent more time than she’d like to admit formatting Gantt charts to print, the dynamic calendar views were refreshing.
The archive capability is a useful feature for companies that may employ temporary or contracted staff. This way, you can hide their information from view but retain the history of their contributions. You can also de-archive the item if and when the staff member returns to employment.
You can bulk import data in a csv file format or build your own API to connect Ganttic with a software tool of your choosing, a feature that is consistent with Ganttic’s philosophy of maximum flexibility and customization. This is a developer’s dream come true and caters to the small and mid-sized businesses that Ganttic seeks to serve.
You can generate a link that allows you to share data externally in a read-only format. Perfect for executive reporting!
Pricing
This is one of Ganttic’s biggest selling points. While many tools charge by the number of licenses—and therefore the number of users in the organization—Ganttic assesses fees based on project size. The free version is limited to ten resources—again referring to anything that you may want to schedule, whether people, conference rooms, supplies, etc.
Beyond that, the pricing structure involves paying for what you use, with options to downgrade, as needed, or opt for a custom option that may not appear in the published listing.
This is an interesting concept and doubtless appeals to growing firms who are burgeoning in size but still chasing their first high dollar value contract. At this juncture in a small business’s growth trajectory, the processes the team initially started with typically require scaling to retain effectiveness. The organization often doesn’t have the capital to hire both new staff and invest in expensive project planning software, even though both are typically needed. The productivity enthusiast in me hopes Ganttic’s flexibility and friendly price tag will prevent companies from having to choose.
Update: The Ganttic team shared several options for how to manipulate the order of the custom fields, including dragging and dropping the fields in your desired order in the Data Fields List View, Project List View table header, or in the Project Data Field dialog. Thanks for sharing!
