So I downloaded and installed the OSX version of GanttProject. Initially I wasn’t too impressed but the software grew on me, this blog post explains why.
The download and install is pretty easy on a Mac. Simply hit the download option drag the icon across to the ‘Applications’ folder from the install popup. Pretty much done and ready to use. Like most things Mac it is pretty straight forward and ‘just works’.
After opening the application you are presented with pretty much an empty project with literally nothing there. I started playing around with adding tasks and this is where the software comes into its own. Everything revolves around the tasks. You can make a task a milestone, you can ‘link’ tasks using the simple indent icons and you can decide to show tasks on the timeline if you wish.
So the process to scaffold out the task list is pretty straight forward. Don’t worry about dates, predecessors or anything else. Simply type out the tasks in a logical order. I decided to also include the milestones as tasks then ‘indent’ or link the tasks within each milestone to it. This creates a nice visual grouping element in the Gantt chart generated. Next step is to create the ‘resources’. For this project that sim ply meant me. Once done I went back and added the resource for each task.
Now that is done – work on the predecessors. This creates a logical linear path for each of the tasks and helps when setting dates and duration. Initially I didn’t set any delays – but did so later only for the weekly reports. Once all of these were set I simply set the first task start date and then adjusted the duration on tasks and that pretty much nailed it.
As the software name implies – it creates nice visuals once the tasks are all set properly. I had to play around with the PERT chart and did some dragging and dropping to make it look a little better. But other then that the software does it all for you.
This tool grows on you the more you use it. I would recommend persisting as I found some features were as good as and perhaps even better than MS Project. As with most things MS – they over complicate things at time. My overall rating is about 8 stars out of 10. For free open source software I was impressed.