No matter which method you use, each of them has two major shortfalls in common; they are locked to your desktop and difficult to use. Ganttic solves these problems.
What is Ganttic?
What is Ganttic Good For?
Ganttic is not a full project management suite. Ganttic is made for managing project schedules and resource allocation, and it does that very well. From its web based interface, Ganttic fills the gap between Outlook calendars and complicated PM software packages. Since it is web based, Ganttic is a natural environment for teamwork. From desk jockeys to field workers, everyone on the value chain can have an updated project plan in real time.
- No more emailing spreadsheets.
- No more managing multiple copies of files.
- No more merging data.
- No more controlling revisions.
Ganttic Users
Ganttic’s typical users consist of organizations focused on project based manufacturing or services with more than 10 shared resources.
Ganttic started its initial beta period in 2009. As a testament to its ease of use and ease of implementation, one of the beta testing companies rolled out Ganttic to its users while still in the beta phase. Training their users on Ganttic required only a single 10 minute video.
Some companies had an even easier time rolling out and adopting Ganttic.
“We needed a better way to schedule a project so that we could see who would be involved and what equipment would be in use. Especially when teams were coming from three different offices nationwide and equipment was being shipped from anywhere in the country.
“We were using a combination of Outlook calendars and Excel spreadsheets at the time, but were quickly outgrowing these scheduling tools.
“When we rolled out Ganttic, we started with a group of 60 people. We just literally emailed out the username and passwords. People just started using it. It was really easy to use and there were very few questions.”
--Pure Technologies
Pricing and Options
Ganttic’s pricing and options are based on the number of resources that need to be tracked, not the number of users logging into the system. This is a really neat way of providing an economic choice to users without sacrificing functionality. Do I really need to track that conference room? If not, save money by subscribing to a lower resource package. Not trusting the cloud? Ganttic has a self-hosted option as well.The Future of Ganttic
There is no denying that the main benefits of Ganttic are its ease of use, ease of implementation, and real-time updating to all users, both local and remote. Building on those strengths, Ganttic is developing an HTML 5 version that will provide increased functionality via the web. The new version will have a responsive design for tablets so Ganttic really can be used anywhere a team member may be.
Ganttic may not be for everyone though. If you require more than project and asset scheduling, then a full PM suite may be what you really need. During the short trial I did, I happened to notice that Ganttic does not allow task splitting – something I do quite often when managing tasks that multiple people work on. There are work-arounds in Ganttic, but needless to say they got an enhancement request from me.
Although very easy to use, Ganttic’s web-based architecture prevents it from having many common interface mechanics, like right clicking to select properties or to modify an item. That particular nit is easy to ignore especially for anyone accustomed to working with web apps. In general, I found Ganttic a pleasure to work with and I highly recommend it to project teams looking for something easier to use than full PM suites but with more functionality than spreadsheets and calendars.Ganttic has paid ENGINEERING.com for promotion of their solutions. They have had no editorial input to this post. All opinions are mine. Scott Wertel