Blog

This is a short eBook posted on Blogger.com. It uses two online tools: Google Docs and Ganttzilla for practical examples of Project Management actions and situations.

URL of the Tutorial is http://project-management-book.blogspot.com

Enjoy;)

Project Plan Templates - are ready to use Project Plan files. They will be ordered by Industry and Category. You will be able open them for both viewing and editing.

Best regards.

Ganttzilla Team.

Dynamic Pool of documents, new important feature of Free Account, was released yesterday. This feature is our new bonus for users who selected Free Account. Instead of fixed limit in 5 Project Plan documents in My Documents page  we're introducing Dynamic Pool for those documents. Now each user with Free Account can easily increase his limit with the help of Social Actions. Referral program is one of them.

How it works: Invite your friends to ganttzilla.com from your Documents page (to do this login and click on inviting others link).

Earning Slots: Each accepted invitation gives you one additional slot to your Pool of Documents.

Another social actions will be availabe soon.

Have a nice day!

G-team.

Ganttzilla team finished survey results analysis. This survey was published last week among all users of Ganttzilla service. Main question of survey was which new features are most desired for users.

First of all we want to say Thank You for all our friends who found time on answering this survey. We received many interesting ideas. Not all of them where included into current high-priority list but all of them will be addressed in future.

So here is list of high-priority upcoming features: tasks filtering and Google Docs integration; mobile project viewer; hosting service. Lets discuss them in details:

Filtering. This feature will allow to apply some filters to project plan tasks. Examples: filtering by task owner, by task start/finish date, by task progress value etc.

Google Docs integration. This feature will allow user to store some project plan to his Google Calendar or Google Spreadsheet. This feature can be combined with Filtering.

Mobile Project Viewer. This feature is interesting to those professionals who is working out of office and without broadband Internet access. In this approach user will access Gnattzilla servise through Mobile Web Site compatible with WAP 2.0 constrains. In short, this is Ganttzilla service adoption to work on simple mobile phone with GPRS connection.

Hosting service will allow users to embed Gantt viewer iframe into their HTML pages.

Best regards.

Ganttzilla Team.

Hi.

Today we broadcasted short survey to our Users. Main target is asking feedback about current state and future directions of Ganttzilla service.

We'll highly appreciate any ideas, concerns and requests. Feel free to post them as comment to this blog post also.

Here is full text of this letter:

What do you find unsatisfactory in our service?
Will you use our service in future? If not, then please explain why?
1. Which directions of future Ganttzilla development are interesting to you?
   • Portfolio Management

   • Project Tracking

   • Agile approach for Planning, BackLog instead of Gantt

   • PERT

   • Custom Calendars

   • Other directions (which?)
Is Ganttzilla easy to understand and work? Do you need some guides or tutorials?
Which new features you're expecting to be implemented?
2. Which language is a working language for you? Do you need localization of User Interface into your language?
Which new Project Plan file formats you want Ganttzilla to support?
Please tell us a couple words about yourself. What is your carrier position and level? How big is your company? How many people in your company needs Ganttzilla account?
Are you interested in API-based access to Ganttzilla functionality?

Best regards,

Ganttzilla Team

Hi!

We're glad to introduce you set of new features comming next after MPP/Planner online Editor.

First of all we had some rethinking about Free type of account. Don't worry it will not reduce your possibilites!  Even more: it will extend limit in 5 documents and will add some benefits.

Probaly you've mentioned already that you NOW have 2 new great features (even in Free Account) - you can create new document and edit it (and any existing document) online with our Flash Gantt Editor. 

This new feature had logical conflict with another limit for Free Account - constant pool in 5 revisions inside each document.Now there is only one revision per document in Free Account but you can save many times to this revision from Editor.

Here is new upcoming feature concerning Free Account: dynamic pool of documents.

You can extend your limit in 5 documents with help of social actions. There are 2 types of such social actions: Refferals invitation and publishing of your documents in Templites Library.

Templates Library - another upcoming feature. This is a big collection of ready-to-use Project Plans for different industries like Healthcare, IT, etc.

And finally we're going to introduce a set of converters for your project plans. Those converters will give you an option to transform MPP file to Planner file, Planner to static HTML... etc. This feature will also allow viewing documents offline in static HTML mode actually.

... those features will be released in 2 steps. Each step will have duration in 2-3 weeks.

........in Proffessional account, as usual, you have NO LIMITS. If you are still on free account, think about this ;)

Enjoy Planning!

G-team.

Today we finished development and testing of Flash-based Editor for Project Plans in all formats supported by our online Viewer.

This is main part of Katya release. Some additional features and content will be published very soon.

Enjoy Ganttzilla!

G-Team.

Online Editor for MS Project and Planner files will be released in second half of September.

We're close to finish of development part of this Editor on basis of Flash technology. Editor will have simplified Planner-like GUI with Drag-n-Drop functionality. Currently we're working around speed optimisation of algorithm of Tasks arrangement inside Gantt graph.

Some time ago I found interesting post "The demise of the Gantt Chart in Agile Software Projects" by David Christiansen about applicability of Gantt diagram for planning of Agile processes.

In short, idea of the post was that Gantt is not acceptable for Agile Life Circles like Scrum. And main reason of this is independent nature of development Tasks.

I just want to figure my vison of the problem, not pretending for the last word in this discussion.

Scrum works with very simple approach for planning named backlog. Developers just have stack with User Stories (Independent Pieces of Functionality to be developed). This stack slicked onto Iteratoions with fixed duration. And we have Velocity - second parameter of Agile plan - this is speed of development of given team.

Gantt is tool for planning of DEPENDENT tasks. This tool can support both planning and optimising (using critical path) of complex projects.

My vision is that backlog and Gantt is two polar cases; or tools for different work. Gantt really not needed for developers if project is coming in well known technological and business domain, User Stories has no relations. But imagine complex project in some new technological domain. Developers need spikes (short learning and/or prototyping) for testing of workability of Architecture. Imagine situation when Customer asked for creation DataWarehouse and wrapping it with business logic. In short, complex project with significant Architectural part can't be planned with backlog tool. They need Gantt.

And second idea. Even if Gantt don't needed for developers in case of simple project, it can be needed for Managers as layout for project tracking, budget planning etc. Gantt can be easily adopted for Scrum Project Plan: Iterations will be presented as Task Groups and User Stories will be shown as Tasks.

Our blog has RSS and ATOM feed channels now.

RSS:  http://www.ganttzilla.com/blog/feed/rss

We had 2 targets in this release. 1st is bugs cleaning and 2nd is embeddind of secured payment system LiqPay for Professional account payments.

We received many very helpful suggestions and bug reports from our community. All  known bugs were fixed in release 1.1. This is our common success. Thanks for your help guys!

Next release will be concentrated on Editor options for MPP, MPX, XML and other Project Plan Formats.

Stay with us. It will be interesting.

Here is Public Gantt of upcoming releases 1.1 and 2.0 (Nika).

Public Gantt is simplified (with low details) real Development Plan. This type of Gantt can be used for informing of Community about development progress of upcoming interesting features.

Features of upcoming Releases.

Release 1.1 target is embedding of secured payment system. 

Release 2.0 (Nika) target is implementation of Editor functionality for MS Project and Planner file formats.

:)

Online Editor of MPP, MPX and Planner files is the next step of our Road Map. We've just started development of this important feature. Preliminary release date is the end of July, 2009.

Our goal is the extension of current collaboration Use Cases around Project Plan creation, editing and broadcasting to Project Team.

We'll inform community about development progress of this feature development with the help of Official Gantt (coming soon).

Stay with us. It will be interesting)

Problem.

Agile is cool.

But Really Big Customers (RBCs) often want some mixed solution. They want to see clear picture of pricing model and simple (transparent) tools for development process tracking. As a result RBC tends to receive Gantt with milestones before project kick off.

From the other hand RBCs are big and inertial systems. So it's hard to receive comprehensive Requirements documentation for the project.

Here is the core problem. RBC enters to the project by Waterfall rules. But Requirements are raw and Development Team will fight with this by applying Agile rules.

Solution

Here is my receipt to resolve this problem. Probably there are smarter and simpler solutions. Any feedback is welcome.

I'll divide this solution in 2 parts:
- hints for creation of Estimation Gantt with milestones
- hints for interfacing Agile process with this Gantt during development

Estimation Gantt (EG) with milestones

a. Whiteboard. Modules list.

First step is drawing modules and their interactions on simple whiteboard. It's good to have some opponent for discussion here. Team Lead of future project is a good candicate for this role. This list will become the skeleton of your EG. Module names will be 1st level Task Groups.

b. Whiteboard. Development Items inside each Module.

The main rule is here to discuss as much details as possible. Customers like detalization in EG. In this way estimation tends to be more transparent. And more clean price of the project.

What kind of items we're talking about?
- UI pages
- Entities for Model
- Web Services for B2B
- Algorithms for complex Math or Stat calculations
- Architecture elements like Scheduler of tasks
- etc.

Those items will be Tasks inside Modules - Task Groups

Also don't forget to add QA tasks.

When estimating each Task you have to rely on historical data of real performance of your team in past on similar tasks. If task has no clear definition or needs investigation then you have to add some additional time to negotiate risk. It's good to have some opponent here too. You can discuss time estimation with someone like Team Lead or Senior Developer. And you can use Ganttzilla for collaboration around this.  

c. Inception Phase.

We have to add Requirements refinement here. For example it can be 2 relatively long tasks:
- Designing wireframes
- Refining use cases  

d. Deployment Phase.

This is some buffer space before going live. Main attention has to be paid for general Functional Testing, Load and Security testing of whole integrated product. Also it's place for optimization and scaling.   

And you have got the Gantt at this point!

d. Milestones.

You have to find points of your Plan where clear deliverables to the customer can be placed. It can be Use Cases documentation, Finished Module with working UI etc.

Development

a. Real development timing behind set of milestones.

It's clear that EG can't be directly applied as development plan. Your work will be Agile. You will have a lot of business questions even after Inception Phase.

You have to create small plans for each iteration. But these plans have to include milestones from EG.

I've found 2 solutions to resolve this problem.
- If development went more quickly then planned by EG then you have to shift some tasks from future Task Groups to current Task Group.
- If development took longer then expected due to incorrect estimate then you have to add more developers. See next topic.

b. Back-up developers.

When you select team for this project you have to add one or two developers as hidden team. This is your resource for fighting against lagging from EG milestones.

Let's discuss those ideas.

Ganttzilla with us) 

This is most important news for our service for today. A big deal of bugs were exterminated. Many crazy ideas killed. And so on... Anyway we're here...

So what is Ganttzilla? (2 "t" and 2 "l" - this is important ) This is way to work with Project Plan documents in more friendly fashon.

Main problem is that Microsoft Project Plan documents become very popular tool in management but there is weak infrastructure to easilly exchange them. Ganttzilla created to resolve this issue. Look at our Feature List to know what we do and our Video Tutorial to know how we do that.

This is just start of our successiful story . We have a lot of interesting ideas which are waiting for implementation. Stay with us, it must be interesting...