Have you been putting off those projects because you don’t know where to start, or you don’t know how you’re going to keep track of all the moving parts?
Many business owners take on projects, without getting organized or having a clear plan on how to get from project conception to completion. Not everyone is naturally good at planning, but it is something that can be learned.
If MS Project scares you or is too expensive, Agantty is a great free alternative for small businesses, or even for individual use. This article will help you determine if Agantty is a good fit for you and your business. Click on each heading below to read more.
Overview
Agantty is a free and easy to use online project management tool. Using a Gantt-chart style interface, you can plan, organize and manage an unlimited amount of projects, tasks and teams with a single account. It helps make project management easy and fun!
Key Features
- Gantt Chart Creation
- Create unlimited projects
- Tasks with overview
- Drag and Drop
- Collaboration and teamwork
- Rights Management
- Reminder Lists
- PDFs
- User management and admin settings
- Create reminders and lists
The Good Stuff:
Easy user interface: The whole user interface of Agantty is very intuitive and easy to learn. I didn’t even have to look at any of the very useful training materials they have to figure out how to create a project or add tasks.
Colour Coding: Each project can have a different colour, which means you can categorize them and easily see each category. I’d expect this to be useful to either visualize projects by Department, or you can use the colours to define project state. For example, I’d set all the projects to green, if they start to slip, they would change to yellow and if they are behind they would be marked as red.
Dashboard View: I love that all tasks across all projects appear on my dashboard and I can easily see what needs to be done today or this week. It also allows you to view by a custom date range, so you can easily plan ahead. It is basically a list view or task view and can also be used as a checklist for projects.
Gantt Chart View: Being able to see everything at once is a bonus. Agantty allows you to customize your view by easily collapsing or opening the tasks for each project, viewing the chart by days or months and quickly getting to specific task details by double-clicking on elements on the chart.
Drag and Drop: The Gantt chart has drag and drop functionality, so once you create a task, you can easily change the duration of it by dragging the ends of the bar, or you can drag the whole bar to new dates, or reorder them to make them easier to view. You can even move the whole project around
Task Assignments and Notifications: This is critical for managing projects. The ability to assign a task to a specific person will ensure everyone knows who is accountable for what. And using the personal dashboard, each person can easily see what they need to get done to meet project deliverables.
Teams: A team is used to group projects together. You can have a team for each of your departments or functional areas. For a software project, you can create a team for Designers, another for Developers, and another for the testing team so that tasks can be assigned to each team.
Dependencies: What? A free project management tool that allows you to EASILY set dependencies?
Upload Documents: Agantty allows you to upload documents from Google Drive or Dropbox to each task. It’s not the MOST collaborative solution out there, but at least you can point to a shared document to work on if necessary. Or to provide additional details for the task, like linking to testing workbooks or requirements documents.
Export and Sync to Google Calendar: Using the Export feature, you can export your calendar tasks from Agantty and import them to your own calendar… and sync them so that your tasks are always in your calendar! You can also export to excel if you need to.
Sharing with stakeholders: As is the case with many projects, you need to communicate with stakeholders. I love that Agantty lets you create a public shareable link so that you can share the project details with whoever may need to know, but not necessarily has any tasks assigned to them.
The Not So Good Stuff
Printing: You may find it a bit challenging to get complex projects printed to PDF to be sharable wish stakeholders.
Collaboration: While Agantty is great for seeing what everyone is working on, it doesn’t work too well for actual collaboration… as in talking with each other. One of the things I really liked from some other alternatives, is the ability to have chat streams for each task or project. That is missing here. Although, not a huge deal because you can always use something like Slack or another to quickly share messages with your team. Another alternative could be to use the description field on the task to link to a shared space, or provide single line updates.
Recommendations
Recommended for:
- Individuals who want to plan out personal projects or keep track of goals.
- Consultants working on multi-step projects for clients that want to track resource time for each step.
- Small to medium-sized business owners with simple projects
- Project and Program Managers
Not recommended for:
- Larger complex projects
- If you need to print visual calendar charts
- Multiple projects lasting more than a year if high-level reporting is important.
Want to try it out for yourself? Visit https://app.agantty.com and let me know what you think!