In the world of software development, agile scrum is often misunderstood by critics as “working without a plan and hoping for the best.” Being able to adjust to learning doesn’t imply a lack of strategy or product goals. After all, even if something is planned to the tiniest detail and executed flawlessly, it can still fail.
To help you demonstrate a plan for your product goals and report on your progress, you can use a Gannt chart. What is it? What are the benefits and best practices for creating one? You’ll learn all of this and more in today’s article!
A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart showing a project’s tasks and activities. Those elements are highlighted in a way to symbolize the length of time a specific task (or its part) will take. The granularity of a Gantt chart can differ and it can show times dedicated to specific goals, epics, or, as already mentioned, single tasks.
Gantt charts help managers and teams plan, monitor, and communicate the progress and status of a project. It’s also great at identifying and highlighting dependencies between different projects and thus, visualizing potential delay risks and important organizational initiatives.
Some of the benefits of using a Gantt chart include:
It should be no surprise that to create this chart, everything within your project needs to already be in order. To proceed you will also need to have your team estimate the tasks in the backlog and tell you how those estimations translate into time they will take. Typically, tasks in a product backlog are estimated on a logarithmic scale, where 1s are really simple endeavors that get more challenging and carry more unknowns as the estimation grows to 3,5, 8, 12, and beyond.
Those translations don’t need to be rock solid, but you need some idea of what time investment to expect from specific tasks. If you and your team are not sure, you can try to measure how tasks of different estimations historically took on average.
Half a sprint should be your minimal unit of time when it comes to creating a Gannt chart. That is because you need to have some “wiggle room” when creating any code — having hours or even days as your base time is simply unrealistic and will never be accurate, regardless of how much planning effort you will invest.
With those prerequisites in place, here are some best practices you should follow when creating a Gantt chart in any software:
A Gantt chart can be created using various tools, such as software applications, plugins (i.e. for project management software Jira), and online platforms. While those options are of course available, they might be overkill for a task as simple as creating this project plan and progress visualization. You should be just fine crafting them in plain Google Sheets using this template:
Just make sure to update the dates and either merge or split cells depending on how long a specific initiative will take. Of course, feel free to add or remove rows (bars) depending on your needs, teams, or however you wish to present this. If something is dependent on another team, I suggest using two colors to make that visible.
As you can see, equipped with the right know-how, a Gantt chart shouldn’t be scary, nor force you to feel too much like a project manager, despite being a product manager. As mentioned in the opening of this article, even if you are a PM in an agile setup, you need to have a plan and be able to demonstrate it to your leadership and managers.
Gantt charts can be a great tool to make this plan visual, easy to follow, and help you identify potentially risky dependencies. The best practices listed along with the provided template should work great for you and help you get started!
Featured image source: IconScout
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