Haven’t Opened MS Project in a Year

I realized today I haven’t actually had to put together a project plan in MS project in the longest time. I don’t even really open other peoples project plans anymore. A few years ago working as a professional services consultant I was constantly in MS Project because, darn it, customers want their Gantt charts. I always found it a very frustrating tool for anything more than a very simple projects. Add a few resources, a few dependencies and then make a change between some linked tasks and you are headed down a rabbit hole pretty quickly. And just try taping together a Gantt chart with 500+ tasks.

MS Project and other project management software largely fades away on Scrum project. Since everything is driven from a backlog and you really track velocity on a daily basis there’s no need for the familiar Gantt chart. Even when I attempted to use XPlanner on a Scrum project it turned out to have to high of an overhead. One of the nicest things about Agile is that you work the plan everyday so you always have a good idea of where you are at least for the near future and the longer term planning is just revisited once a month.