Ask HN: Are Gantt Charts Used in Industry

3 points by washedDeveloper 4 years ago | 9 comments

We have been using Gantt charts in my engineering class for the last 2 semesters and honestly I find it pointless. I’m really curious if they are used in industry. I find a lot of project management tools we have learned in this class to simply beat around the bush of actually getting things done.

jvalencia 4 years ago |

Yes, absolutely.

I think it can feel pointless when it's just a few people or less. At that size it may just be easier and more effective to wing it, or keep a todo list.

However, when you start involving more people than you can talk to easily, the work starts to pull apart into an incoherent mess. For work to be well coordinated at scale, one person needs to be able to hand off to another person. One team needs to hand off to another team. If dependencies weren't done on time, you could have a whole specialized team that is missing what they need to be effective or on time.

At that larger scale you need something to keep track of who, what, when. JIRA, monday, spreadsheets --- in some ways it doesn't matter, but there needs to be management that did not exist and probably wasn't needed at the small scale.

Jtsummers 4 years ago | |

They're also useful for small groups, though maybe less useful. They show dependencies between tasks, which tasks can be done concurrently, and which tasks need to be done first, which is useful for organization on every level. It's just that with smaller groups you can (often) get by with almost any approach, even down to just "put a bunch of sticky notes on the wall and take them off when done", trusting that people know the dependencies and priorities.

washedDeveloper 4 years ago | |

Thanks for this perspective. I hadn't really considered large scale usage. In my class the team sizes are just 4 members so it feels quite pointless for this scale. But know thinking about it, it makes sense to have a project management system in place.

Reebz 4 years ago | | |

As much as agile is shouted from the rooftops for engineering and design, many businesses run in waterfall.

The reality is that budgeting and roadmapping is roughly an annual process. At that time scale and with sufficient people scale, management will need to illustrate how they will be spending millions of dollars and the sequence of activities.

Gantt charts are often the defacto communication method because people from many skills backgrounds easily understand them.

borealis-dev 4 years ago |

As a developer that has worked almost exclusively in startups for the past 16 years, I have not once had to create or even look at a Gantt chart. Most organizations I encounter follow the Agile principles (at least in a loose sense), which emphasizes getting things done over upfront planning. That's not to say that no planning is done, but it's more and more common to see Kanban-inspired processes where work is prioritized into a backlog and then pulled by a developer when they have capacity to work on it.

Like I said, my experience is mostly in startups. YMMV.

Jxl180 4 years ago |

I live and die by gantt charts. As an engineer, if I'm convincing my company to spend a quarter million dollars per year on a tool, the business folks want to see I can productionalize it within the year and onboard everyone or else I've thrown away the equivalent of a Lamborghini.

yen223 4 years ago |

Gantt charts are one of the few things from those boring mandatory project management classes that actually show up in real life. It's a simple way to visualise project dependencies and timelines, the two most important things which anyone managing projects would care about.

EngCanMan 4 years ago |

All construction projects use them, nobody has found a better way to show dependancies of the many many trades.

aprdm 4 years ago |

yes