How Do Gantt Charts Support Agile Development?
As Winston Churchill famously said, “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” This quote resonates strongly, particularly in the field of project management, whereby careful planning is paramount to project success.
And what better way to plan and monitor project progress than by using Gantt charts? Rooted within the manufacturing and construction industries, Gantt charts give you a blueprint for success.
Fast forward to the present time, the situation is a complete 180 in agile development. So much so that Gantt charts were actually banned in the first implementation of Scrum! Agile experts believe that the immutable nature of Gantt charts simply doesn’t gel with the mutable nature of agile development.
But we beg to differ!
Why Gantt Charts Aren’t Agile’s Worst Enemy
Sure, Gantt charts and agile are contrary by nature. But, as they say, opposites attract. When they come together, Gantt charts and agile workflows can enable superior project management. Resembling a truly symbiotic relationship, Gantt charts can support agile development in the following areas:
Balancing planning and agility opens up the holy grail of project management success. In which, you can adopt iterative development without compromising the big picture plan.
Keep reading to know how.
A Big-Picture View Helps You Fend Off Scope Creep
Gantt charts are not merely fancy colored bars. They offer a big-picture view of projects.
With an expansive overview of tasks and schedules, the development and monitoring of complex projects is simplified. But why is this important, you ask? Well, it’s because big-picture planning is the perfect antidote to scope creep that plagues agile approaches.
Some of the main tenets of agile are flexibility and adaptability, which enable teams to respond to change quickly. For example, software companies can now quickly ship a minimum viable product based on real-time market demand, as opposed to spending years on developing the complete working software.
While this makes for faster product delivery, uncontrolled flexibility (especially in the middle of a sprint cycle) can spiral downwards into scope creep.
Accommodating the development of new features can shake up resource availability. It can also derail the timeline with dependent tasks from the original plan. These issues, in turn, lead to other frustrating complications like project delays and budget overruns.
Gantt charts mitigate scope creep greatly with resource management and dependency visualization capabilities. Project managers can manage project resources (e.g. staff, cost, duration) effectively for optimal performance. More importantly, they can reduce the risk of individual overcommitment and potential delays. Since Gantt charts visualize task dependencies, PMs and team members can also see how tasks are interconnected with each other and with the overarching project.
Take-Home Message: Gantt charts’ big-picture view and agile development’s flexibility give rise to controlled, valuable reiteration.
Milestones: The Cornerstone of Practical Task Prioritization
Let’s face it, milestones are the cornerstone of successful task prioritization — for both agile and waterfall approaches. With accurate task prioritization, your teams can focus on completing important tasks first and contribute positively to overall project progression.
In agile development, task prioritization happens during sprint planning. And it’s done by considering various factors like project goals, business value to customers, availability of teams, and so on.
But what about enterprise-wide collaboration that involves multiple departments? You can prioritize tasks from the product backlog and assign them to your teams. But there may be conflict if one team’s tasks are blocking another’s. Since there isn’t prioritization at the team level, your teams will end up working in reverse order.
The best way to facilitate cross-functional collaboration is by setting milestones. Which helps everyone prioritize their tasks in a logical sequence.
For instance, a marketing project has two major milestones — campaign proposal and campaign activation. Visualizing these milestones on a Gantt chart makes it easier for different teams to coordinate their tasks. Since the campaign proposal milestone is the first approval checkpoint, you can even allocate more resources to ensure successful delivery of the tasks required to achieve this milestone.
This way, teams are not lost in a sea of tasks and PMs have better control over their projects for timely delivery.
Take-Home Message: Indicate major project milestones using Gantt charts, prioritize tasks with the highest impact on milestones, and assign resources accordingly.
Bringing Agile and Non-Agile Teams Together
Every project requires the collaborative efforts of various teams. But this is easier said than done. Different teams often have their own project management lexicon.
Team-specific project taxonomy and workflows, if not unified properly, may cause siloed information and systems. When this sets in, workplace productivity and project quality suffer greatly.
Now is the time for Gantt charts to shine!
Gantt charts are the bridge that connects agile, non-agile, and hybrid teams together. Having a visual representation of the complete project progress and reporting, teams of different backgrounds can easily understand the relationship between tasks and who’s responsible for what.
With transparency into the project, no one gets lost in a jungle of jargon!
Take-Home Message: Gantt charts are visual tools that break down the project management lexicon and information silos across teams of different backgrounds.
Communicate Project Progress with Gantt Charts
In agile development, important metrics like burndown, velocity, and lead time serve as discussion triggers during the sprint retrospective. For your teams, these metrics are a godsend; for higher management, not so much.
C-level executives are more concerned with the overall project timeline instead of individual sprints.
Hence, you can leverage Gantt charts to effortlessly communicate project progress to higher management. Not just for reporting, Gantt charts also allow you to present the project scope and set realistic expectations with stakeholders, in case of any changes.
Take-Home Message: Agile reporting does wonders for internal team discussion; Gantt charts are excellent for higher management discussion.
Gantt Charts Reinforce Agile Development
To reiterate (pun intended), Gantt charts seamlessly complement agile development. They reinforce any areas of agile project management that could potentially affect the project quality, multi-team productivity, and communication.
The good news is, there are plenty of agile project management software tools that come with a Gantt chart feature. Stay tuned for upcoming posts, where we will introduce to you the best project management software for agile teams.
Or are you already using one? Share with us in the comments below!
