Meet the new Gantt | Workflow Management Software

We’re really excited to be releasing a new Gantt view this week. This is an initial step in our move towards a more visual approach to workflow management for creative agencies. Our goal is to ultimately make the planning process easier and faster, and adding the Gantt view is the newest enhancement to the scheduling and tasking module of Function Point.

Gantt is really about being able to visualize and make adjustments to items on a project or schedule that relate to one another. With a list view of schedule deadlines, it’s hard to quickly understand the timeline in workflow management for creative agencies. Gantt gives a visual snapshot of this data and makes it easy to identify bottlenecks.

Ultimately, Gantt supports our finance-first product vision of connecting the financial management and workflow management for agencies. Typically, the estimating and planning processes are separate, and our goal is to marry them. An account executive may tell a customer a project will cost $20,000, but the planning process doesn’t tell you the same thing. If these elements are integrated, the data could be sliced in several ways and looked at through different lenses. For example, one lens may be the planning side of the agency and another is to provide a client-facing quote.

What’s Next?

Through our product development and release process, we deliver incremental new releases. We do this to gather feedback from clients and have our users test new features so we can make the right improvements as we go.

Future iterations of the Gantt view will include building new task types and features that have adjustability and interactivity — such as predecessor dependencies, recurring tasks, meeting tasks and milestones. Working closely with a number of clients, we know how rapidly things change on projects — tasks may be moved around, added, or cancelled. Users need to be able to see the status of a project at a glance, and that’s why we’re focusing on the visual piece so much.

We’ve also made a big change to the pace of release. Our development team has gone from six people to seventeen, so our ability to deliver is accelerating, and our customers are starting to see what we’ve been working on for the past eighteen months.

Stay Tuned

Stay tuned for more releases that’ll see the integration of project management with the financial components of the system become more streamlined. This will enable creative agencies to be more productive and profitable.

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This article was contributed by former Function Point employee, Tate Lillies.