5 ms·

> Also called the “waterfall” method, Gantt charts create a visual metaphor of tasks and their dependencies and contingencies so you can see each individual tas

> Also called the “waterfall” method, Gantt charts create a visual metaphor of tasks and their dependencies and contingencies so you can see each individual task in terms of when it should start and when it must be completed, relative to the overall project and the tasks coming before it. That's a strange claim. Gantt charts are not a method, so claiming that they're "[a]lso called the “waterfall” method" is bizarre on its face. Gantt charts are a tool. They're a visualization of a schedule: the items, their expected start time, duration, their relation to each other. It's useful for any project management team. You have N issues you need to resolve (Waterfall or not) and some can be done in parallel but others have dependencies? A Gantt chart can help you visualize how the work will play out.

zabzonk 3y ago
i agree - of all of the crap-fest of diagrams one comes across, i find gantt charts one of the least obnoxious.
rqtwteye 3y ago
After working in too many badly run "agile" environments I really want waterfall to come back. There at least you know where you want to be in a year and how different workstreams fit together. Of course you have to iterate on the plan and respond to changes but that's just common sense in my view.
- s_dev 3y ago
  I read this and it's just insane to me -- would be like arguing for svn to come back instead of all this 'git' nonsense. The battles were fought and svn lost. Agile became adopted because waterfall is suited for construction projects or factory floors not software development. It accounts for the fact that software developers are very poor estimators (even the best software devs) determining how long things take to build or implement.
  - Shadowmist 3y ago
    Yeah, like construction is known for its ability to deliver on time.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    On waterfall vs agile, both don't work without significant flexibility and fuzzying the game on the dev team's part. Waterfall as it was done in early 2000s was mostly a high level plan and smaller unofficial iterations on the ground. We knew we need to test, and sometimes partially release stuff in advance to have an idea of what's actually working and what's half baked. The same way successful agile projects are almost always done with unofficial rough planning and dependency graphing checked ahead, and smaller iterarion following the big picture from there. On both methodologies, religiously adhering to the mantra is suicidal, and I don't see agile being significantly better except if all you care about it getting paid iteratively -- which is a noble goal for a consultant. Perhaps the point that bears reiterating is very few shops actually followed hard line waterfall planning (nor agile, for that matter).
  - frozenlettuce 3y ago
    For most developers, agile means being coached daily like in a sports team. Most folks just want to know what to do, work on it, deliver and repeat. Instead of empowering developers it allows managers to micromanage with a daily feedback loop.
    - darreninthenet 3y ago
      Which is not how agile is supposed to be done. Waterfall done badly is shit as well.
      - spentu 3y ago
        Not supposed, but is done like that.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Most commercial developers are using git as if it was svn with some local caching, and other small features that could be added to svn (at some cost). They call their svn central server github. Very few take advantage of what makes git different from svn. Svn lost, but the reasons were not always good (I never used svn so I cannot comment in detail, but the VCSs I used before git are still the same workflows most use with git)
- orochimaaru 3y ago
  Ooh - I got this monstrosity called SAFe (scaled agile framework) for you ;)
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Of course you have to iterate on the plan and respond to changes If Agile didn't exist I think we would have just invented it.
- heisgone 3y ago
  It's all about Power. In an organisation, the person making the "biggest decisions" (largest budget, biggest plan, further in the futur) is the facto at the top of the hierachy and calling the shot. SCRUM is all about making sure developers are not involved in long term planning and allowing non-technical people to be in charge.
- rpcope1 3y ago
  This is almost certainly why SAFe (as flawed as it is) tends to be popular among orgs with any size at all.
- gostsamo 3y ago
  Bad management can corrupt any methodology and then use it as an excuse later. Waterfall can't save you from this one. At best, it will hype you for flexible which will be agile 2.0 with a green leave on the genitals.
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    That’s my point. Any method will get corrupted by bad players. My comment was on a lot of agile environments that have turned into micromanagement machines that discourage any kind of long term thinking. If you only look to the next scrum you are pretty much guaranteed to create massive tech debt in the form of many quick fixes.
    - gostsamo 3y ago
      Well, let me tell you how waterfall will turn into a constant micromanagement hell where the long term plan will be reevaluated every couple of weeks to realign it with the latest available info. My point is that the uncertainty in a project is a constant and every methodology which tries to change it can only hinder the work of a team. The best we can hope is that we know what we don't know and have enough robustness to handle what we don't expect.
joegahona 3y ago
Gantt charts are also instantly understandable by leadership types, people in Sales/Marketing, etc. The same can't be said for a lot of the other cool-kid artifacts flying around these days.
manicennui 3y ago
I've never seen Gantt charts used for anything other than setting unrealistic expectations.
- wrycoder 3y ago
  That’s just a function of management forcing.
- dqft 3y ago
  Part 1 of the 2 part Senior capstone project for the software engineering program I attended required students to create a a full project management suite of Gantt charts, UML diagrams, etc and approval from your advisor before continuing with actually building software in part 2. Naturally, I built the software package, then wrote my charts, and the 2nd semester did nothing. It was a complete joke.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    This is the way.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  I think they have a place to at least try to layout dependencies but in terms of something useful after that they’re not great.
wrycoder 3y ago
Gantt and PERT based project management tools are just a way for handling task dependencies and resource constraints. They can be used with any methodology - waterfall, Spiral, etc. Most of the “modern” methodologies like scrum are too short cycled to handle complexity well. It seems that the classic techniques like PERT have been forgotten since my PM days. Very useful for something like building a house. Part of the problem: I haven’t been able to find a decent FOSS replacement for MS Project, which is pretty expensive and not open source. Any ideas?
- dvdkon 3y ago
  What's your workflow in MS Project? I've talked a lot about PM software with non-IT people who have needs that don't fit into the issue-tracking systems I know, so I'm interested to know what you use in MS Project. From my outside view it looks like just one big Gantt chart.
  - wrycoder 3y ago
    I start by building a Gantt for the top level. Sometimes, I'll just build a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) (the first two columns, e.g. 1. Survey 2. Foundation 2.1 Excavation 2.2 Concrete Forms etc. and put the task duration in the third column.) Then I start adding links to task predecessors. If that starts getting messy on the Gantt, I print out a PERT network, tape it together, hang it on the wall and start brainstorming with a felt tip. Enter any added links into the project. At this point, run a Critical Path calculation (longest path through network from start to finish), which gives you the slack on the CP relative to your must finish date. Hopefully, there is some. If not, look for parallelism opportunities. Once that's all planned out, some PMs check to see if they have enough human resources to accomplish the tasks, especially the ones running in parallel. Enter the resources, and the software will commit them as early as possible. If there aren't enough, it will push out the critical path. Issue tracking is pretty orthogonal to project management, unless it identifies unplanned tasks out of the expected workflow. Issue tracking is usually much finer grained than project tasks. For software, consider this: you want to do an initial system integration acceptance test with the customer next week. You just started the project. What needs to be done to pass that acceptance test? That's your first Gantt/PERT/CPM. You revise it for every integration test as the project develops, sometimes totally. In the old days, we'd call that a Spiral methodology. Top down, but keep re-visiting the top level on a scheduled basis at formal Project Reviews with the customer and negotiating any changes. For a house, you are just starting. You want a certificate of occupancy in two months. Do you have drawings and a building permit? What needs to be done? Is it even possible? (Changes and delays will kill you, but it's always wise to move as quickly as possible!)
andrei_says_ 3y ago
Tasks however are often interconnected to multiple other tasks and often can be a bit unpredictable. So the Gantt chart model ends up being deceptive in both its simplicity and predictability.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  The Gantt chart can track dependencies, including multiple dependencies. The issue is whether you've discovered all of your task interdependencies or not and whether you add them to the dataset when you find them missing. If you haven't and you don't, you'll be screwed no matter what tools or techniques you use. It's also possible, and sane people do this, to use ranges instead of fixed times for your durations. This helps to discover risk (particularly of exceeding a deadline).
  - andrei_says_ 3y ago
    > If you haven't and you don't, you'll be screwed no matter what tools or techniques you use. Discovering all interdependencies and details takes much more time than completing a significant amount of the tasks. So again, the diminishing returns of project planning/guessing/tracking vs completing the work. Also task discovery amidst execution.
    - Jtsummers 3y ago
      Good news! It can be an ongoing thing. Tag your issues, tasks, whatevers as you discover missing connections and reevaluate your plan on an ongoing basis. It's not a commitment, only fools commit to plans with incomplete information (and no plan has complete information, unless you can see the future).
atoav 3y ago
Gantt charts are indeed a tool and like every tool one has to be careful to apply it in the right situation. The problem with some (many?) project managers is that they don't make that distinction. They just try to apply the same tools to every situation. Gannt charts for example are relatively useless to model processes that involve a lot of unknowns or branching paths. And of in such a project they are relied uppon they can become actively harmful. But this can be the case for literally every other PM tool.
prepend 3y ago
I think the author conflated things or interviewed poor project managers, or something something bad journalism/wired/etc The Gantt chart is from Gantt’s method that I think were pretty much all waterfall projects as he practiced 100 years ago making factories or whatever. But the chart is used everywhere and is super common in agile tools just to sequence stuff and demonstrate your start to start and start to finish, etc dependencies. It’s a common test to see if things targeted will fit in a sprint. It’s funny when an article’s author doesn’t even read the Wikipedia article on things which makes you wonder what his method is for writing these. Is he randomly inserting terms?

zabzonk 3y ago

i agree - of all of the crap-fest of diagrams one comes across, i find gantt charts one of the least obnoxious.

rqtwteye 3y ago

After working in too many badly run "agile" environments I really want waterfall to come back. There at least you know where you want to be in a year and how different workstreams fit together. Of course you have to iterate on the plan and respond to changes but that's just common sense in my view.

s_dev 3y ago
I read this and it's just insane to me -- would be like arguing for svn to come back instead of all this 'git' nonsense. The battles were fought and svn lost. Agile became adopted because waterfall is suited for construction projects or factory floors not software development. It accounts for the fact that software developers are very poor estimators (even the best software devs) determining how long things take to build or implement.
- Shadowmist 3y ago
  Yeah, like construction is known for its ability to deliver on time.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  On waterfall vs agile, both don't work without significant flexibility and fuzzying the game on the dev team's part. Waterfall as it was done in early 2000s was mostly a high level plan and smaller unofficial iterations on the ground. We knew we need to test, and sometimes partially release stuff in advance to have an idea of what's actually working and what's half baked. The same way successful agile projects are almost always done with unofficial rough planning and dependency graphing checked ahead, and smaller iterarion following the big picture from there. On both methodologies, religiously adhering to the mantra is suicidal, and I don't see agile being significantly better except if all you care about it getting paid iteratively -- which is a noble goal for a consultant. Perhaps the point that bears reiterating is very few shops actually followed hard line waterfall planning (nor agile, for that matter).
- frozenlettuce 3y ago
  For most developers, agile means being coached daily like in a sports team. Most folks just want to know what to do, work on it, deliver and repeat. Instead of empowering developers it allows managers to micromanage with a daily feedback loop.
  - darreninthenet 3y ago
    Which is not how agile is supposed to be done. Waterfall done badly is shit as well.
    - spentu 3y ago
      Not supposed, but is done like that.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Most commercial developers are using git as if it was svn with some local caching, and other small features that could be added to svn (at some cost). They call their svn central server github. Very few take advantage of what makes git different from svn. Svn lost, but the reasons were not always good (I never used svn so I cannot comment in detail, but the VCSs I used before git are still the same workflows most use with git)
orochimaaru 3y ago
Ooh - I got this monstrosity called SAFe (scaled agile framework) for you ;)
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Of course you have to iterate on the plan and respond to changes If Agile didn't exist I think we would have just invented it.
heisgone 3y ago
It's all about Power. In an organisation, the person making the "biggest decisions" (largest budget, biggest plan, further in the futur) is the facto at the top of the hierachy and calling the shot. SCRUM is all about making sure developers are not involved in long term planning and allowing non-technical people to be in charge.
rpcope1 3y ago
This is almost certainly why SAFe (as flawed as it is) tends to be popular among orgs with any size at all.
gostsamo 3y ago
Bad management can corrupt any methodology and then use it as an excuse later. Waterfall can't save you from this one. At best, it will hype you for flexible which will be agile 2.0 with a green leave on the genitals.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  That’s my point. Any method will get corrupted by bad players. My comment was on a lot of agile environments that have turned into micromanagement machines that discourage any kind of long term thinking. If you only look to the next scrum you are pretty much guaranteed to create massive tech debt in the form of many quick fixes.
  - gostsamo 3y ago
    Well, let me tell you how waterfall will turn into a constant micromanagement hell where the long term plan will be reevaluated every couple of weeks to realign it with the latest available info. My point is that the uncertainty in a project is a constant and every methodology which tries to change it can only hinder the work of a team. The best we can hope is that we know what we don't know and have enough robustness to handle what we don't expect.

joegahona 3y ago

Gantt charts are also instantly understandable by leadership types, people in Sales/Marketing, etc. The same can't be said for a lot of the other cool-kid artifacts flying around these days.

manicennui 3y ago

I've never seen Gantt charts used for anything other than setting unrealistic expectations.

wrycoder 3y ago
That’s just a function of management forcing.
dqft 3y ago
Part 1 of the 2 part Senior capstone project for the software engineering program I attended required students to create a a full project management suite of Gantt charts, UML diagrams, etc and approval from your advisor before continuing with actually building software in part 2. Naturally, I built the software package, then wrote my charts, and the 2nd semester did nothing. It was a complete joke.
- pjc50 3y ago
  This is the way.
meheleventyone 3y ago
I think they have a place to at least try to layout dependencies but in terms of something useful after that they’re not great.

wrycoder 3y ago

Gantt and PERT based project management tools are just a way for handling task dependencies and resource constraints. They can be used with any methodology - waterfall, Spiral, etc. Most of the “modern” methodologies like scrum are too short cycled to handle complexity well. It seems that the classic techniques like PERT have been forgotten since my PM days. Very useful for something like building a house. Part of the problem: I haven’t been able to find a decent FOSS replacement for MS Project, which is pretty expensive and not open source. Any ideas?

dvdkon 3y ago
What's your workflow in MS Project? I've talked a lot about PM software with non-IT people who have needs that don't fit into the issue-tracking systems I know, so I'm interested to know what you use in MS Project. From my outside view it looks like just one big Gantt chart.
- wrycoder 3y ago
  I start by building a Gantt for the top level. Sometimes, I'll just build a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) (the first two columns, e.g. 1. Survey 2. Foundation 2.1 Excavation 2.2 Concrete Forms etc. and put the task duration in the third column.) Then I start adding links to task predecessors. If that starts getting messy on the Gantt, I print out a PERT network, tape it together, hang it on the wall and start brainstorming with a felt tip. Enter any added links into the project. At this point, run a Critical Path calculation (longest path through network from start to finish), which gives you the slack on the CP relative to your must finish date. Hopefully, there is some. If not, look for parallelism opportunities. Once that's all planned out, some PMs check to see if they have enough human resources to accomplish the tasks, especially the ones running in parallel. Enter the resources, and the software will commit them as early as possible. If there aren't enough, it will push out the critical path. Issue tracking is pretty orthogonal to project management, unless it identifies unplanned tasks out of the expected workflow. Issue tracking is usually much finer grained than project tasks. For software, consider this: you want to do an initial system integration acceptance test with the customer next week. You just started the project. What needs to be done to pass that acceptance test? That's your first Gantt/PERT/CPM. You revise it for every integration test as the project develops, sometimes totally. In the old days, we'd call that a Spiral methodology. Top down, but keep re-visiting the top level on a scheduled basis at formal Project Reviews with the customer and negotiating any changes. For a house, you are just starting. You want a certificate of occupancy in two months. Do you have drawings and a building permit? What needs to be done? Is it even possible? (Changes and delays will kill you, but it's always wise to move as quickly as possible!)

andrei_says_ 3y ago

Tasks however are often interconnected to multiple other tasks and often can be a bit unpredictable. So the Gantt chart model ends up being deceptive in both its simplicity and predictability.

Jtsummers 3y ago
The Gantt chart can track dependencies, including multiple dependencies. The issue is whether you've discovered all of your task interdependencies or not and whether you add them to the dataset when you find them missing. If you haven't and you don't, you'll be screwed no matter what tools or techniques you use. It's also possible, and sane people do this, to use ranges instead of fixed times for your durations. This helps to discover risk (particularly of exceeding a deadline).
- andrei_says_ 3y ago
  > If you haven't and you don't, you'll be screwed no matter what tools or techniques you use. Discovering all interdependencies and details takes much more time than completing a significant amount of the tasks. So again, the diminishing returns of project planning/guessing/tracking vs completing the work. Also task discovery amidst execution.
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    Good news! It can be an ongoing thing. Tag your issues, tasks, whatevers as you discover missing connections and reevaluate your plan on an ongoing basis. It's not a commitment, only fools commit to plans with incomplete information (and no plan has complete information, unless you can see the future).

atoav 3y ago

Gantt charts are indeed a tool and like every tool one has to be careful to apply it in the right situation. The problem with some (many?) project managers is that they don't make that distinction. They just try to apply the same tools to every situation. Gannt charts for example are relatively useless to model processes that involve a lot of unknowns or branching paths. And of in such a project they are relied uppon they can become actively harmful. But this can be the case for literally every other PM tool.

prepend 3y ago

I think the author conflated things or interviewed poor project managers, or something something bad journalism/wired/etc The Gantt chart is from Gantt’s method that I think were pretty much all waterfall projects as he practiced 100 years ago making factories or whatever. But the chart is used everywhere and is super common in agile tools just to sequence stuff and demonstrate your start to start and start to finish, etc dependencies. It’s a common test to see if things targeted will fit in a sprint. It’s funny when an article’s author doesn’t even read the Wikipedia article on things which makes you wonder what his method is for writing these. Is he randomly inserting terms?