Gantt Charts: The Ultimate Guide For Startups
Everything you need to know about Gantt Charts for a Startup business. Insight into why, how, what, and best practices.
We live in the age of technique, not technology.
At first, the notion may sound laughable, however, when dissected on a deeper level, it’s quite true and intuitive.
Other than luck, success depends on a body of methods we exercise to accomplish a certain goal, and the manners we use in tackling our tasks. That’s technique by definition.
Every prudent Startup business is well aware of this.
Imagine for a second. There you are, envisioning your product or service, conceptualized a proper business plan, did the whole nine (math) yards on risks and trends, allocated the necessary investment funds, and you’re finally ready to kick-off your startup venture.
What’s the single most important asset in your books? The mindset of your people, that is, the holistic sum of techniques all of you possess.
Not the products, not the services, not the technology, not even your network, let alone the office space or any infrastructural marvel, but the cumulative set of methods you employ when using knowledge and skills.
To what extent?
To keep your business processes, projects, tasks, timelines, or any other activity paramount to your overall success in check, you must empower yourself to deliver your business purpose to the world and to make some money while you’re at it.
That’s where the Gantt Chart and the underlying methodology becomes a necessity. It’s not an option but a requirement to achieve our goals — particularly in Startups.
How can a Startup company use the Gantt Chart?
Naturally, through technology. But, since the majority of us in the Startup arena don’t have the exact need, nor the budget, to deploy custom-made solutions— we usually seek a proper balance of technique and available technology.
The use of Gantt Charts apps for startups as part of their project management is driven by the ability to increase alignment and visibility of their objectives within their team’s workflow.
That’s the case with Nifty: It’s your collaboration hub that unites goals, actions, and communications in one place.
However, to understand how the use of Gantt Charts can contribute to the overall business success of your startup — especially if you’re in SaaS vertical — we need to step back and realize why Gantt Chart exists in the first place, and where it comes from.
Underlying Layers: The Real Why
In reality, Gantt Task System enabled workers to make a living and to learn how to increase efficiency, which in turn led to doubled production rates over time. The result heavily influenced Gantt’s view on employees’ wellbeing and morale as the leading factors in the company’s success.
In his seminal book Work, Wages, and Profits, Gantt writes:
“Whatever we do must be in accord with human nature. We cannot drive people; we must direct their development. The general policy of the past has been to drive; but the era of force must give way to that of knowledge, and the policy of the future will be to teach and lead, to the advantage of all concerned.”
This angle of Gantt’s mindset and thought process, on the other hand, provides a testimonial on why he envisioned the bar chart in the first place. It was not just about productivity, transparency, or control, but about the welfare of the business endeavor itself.
But, how does the Gantt Chart work in real life?
Nuts and bolts are, of course, almost self-evident. Most charts nowadays look like a detailed calendar combined with activities and resources.
The top-level (the X-axis) is reserved for the timeline that shows days, weeks, or months, which let you see tasks’ chronology. The left column (the Y-axis) can include the list of activities or phases or individual team members, including all projects at glance. The highly customizable design allows you to visualize the whole pipeline, track progress, have full situational awareness of what’s coming next, and to optimize workload when necessary.
However, what appears to be quite similar to a conventional spreadsheet is just the segment of Gantt Chart potentials in project management. The real power comes when you take dependencies, phases’ overlaps, alerts, key events, and project milestones into consideration.
Better known as PERT (The Program Evaluation Review Technique), tasks’ dependency — as fundamental business intelligence and insight — is infinitely harder to interpret than other information.
Therefore, the most advanced Gantt Chart solutions by default integrate PERT methodology into their functionalities. Whether by using graphic symbols (circles, rectangles) or any other form that creates a correlation between activities in time, these two aspects are of paramount importance to managers.
Without a possibility to understand dependency between milestones and resources necessary to manage each phase of a project, Gantt Chart, however advanced, is nothing more than a greatly designed task-list combined with the calendar.
Gantt Chart in a highly advanced project management software gives you the power to sustain discipline during the execution.
Yes, your startup success relies solely on the mindset and techniques of your people, but it’s the discipline that glues them into a cohesive, well-directed effort.
Just like you, we did our homework well. We knew we had a great vision and useful product to share with the world. We also knew we wanted to make a personal legacy when it comes to the empowerment of others to do the same, even to surpass us.
The mindset and the angle of Henry Gantt’s approach to workforce progress, knowledge, the policy of teaching and leading to the advantage of all involved had a fundamental impact on each member of our team.
At Nifty, we decided to lead by example.
During the whole process of building Nifty, we’ve embedded all of our learnings, hiccups, challenges, and frustrations that we faced during the management of projects.
It was a demanding and tough yet highly rewarding process. Without using the Gantt Chart integrated with PERT, we would not be here today.
Nowhere is this axiom more visible than in the operations of startups. Rarely do we find more helping hand than Gantt Chart itself.
The Structure and Benefits of Gantt Chart
That’s why at Nifty — we strive for unmatched operational intelligence, collaboration, workflow management, and transparency through the integration of tasks and activities into the designated roles of team members.
During our development, we’ve realized that these functionalities take Gantt Chart and PERT to a whole new level.
Our Product Teams were able to easily get an overview of their assignments on a daily or weekly basis. Our Head of Marketing was able to track the progress of website development and align other promotional efforts accordingly.
For us, the whole experience was more than crafting the best project management tool with best-in-class Gantt Chart and PERT that will serve tech and other Startups equally. Surely, it was about creating a one-stop-shop when it comes to workflow stages, resources allocation, project pipelines, internal communications, KPIs evaluation — in a word, the roadmap — but it was also about walking our talk.
By using our startup as a testbed, we were able to crash-test the finest details and tune them up in real-life scenarios.
In return, you get to enjoy the benefits of the premier Gantt Chart.
Be aware of everything. Understand it fully. Be able to make a drill-down to the grittiest level. See all dependencies. Know your logistics. Put your people in the best roles. Create awareness and transparency. Know milestones miles ahead. Manage comprehensiveness. Stay organized. Handle adversity. Build resilience. Then, evaluate. Make the right moves. Be agile, proactive, creative. Unleash yourself, use each day full-bore. Stay in control. Go higher, deeper, wider.
The Technology Outside the Cave
Indeed, Gantt Chart is all about technique in terms of knowledge, skills, methodology, learning, leading, about the manners we exercise to face any relevant task, particularly in the startup phase of our businesses.
The essence of the technique has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it’s about mindset.
At a certain point, all of us get to somehow break out of the cave, into the light. We realize that there’s so much more to life — or business or any other realm of our existence — than just shadows. We see the world, the new reality, the Sun, the stars, the energy, the blinding things we cannot grasp at once. Some of us return to the cave, some of us proceed toward the higher, more profitable reality.
The knowledge about techniques is nowadays at our fingertips. And this is the time and place where you, our dear software evangelists, come into the picture. (“Hm, now you’re trying to make some nifty move like it’s up to us to get you from your cave. All right, let’s see what you have.”)
It’s not up to technology to get us out of the cave, but it certainly might be up to technology to keep us out of it.
Finally, whenever a startup company embraces the mindset behind any premier Gantt Chart — and everything it represents — success is inevitable. It’s only a question of time.
Choose the niftiest software solution to guide you through, you might get there sooner.
Ready to use Gantt Charts in Nifty way? Sign up for Nifty 🎉 and let’s move your startup venture forward.
