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KeyedIn’s Enhanced Gantt Chart Performance Brings the Promise of Better PM Process Adoption
One of the newest features in KeyedIn’s cloud-based PPM solution is an improved Gantt chart experience, designed to facilitate ease-of-use for enterprise organizations.
As the press release for the new functionality notes, the improved Gantt chart will enhance processing by ten times, enabling users to execute projects with more than 2,000 tasks seamlessly, with no lags in performance.
This focus on enhanced Gantt chart performance is certainly a positive one. As project management process stewards and coaches can attest to, the processing time of PM software can be one of the primary barriers to process adoption. As a project portfolio management analyst, one of the main complaints I hear from practitioners in the field is around the time-cost of entering multiple tasks or resources into their commercial PM software. In some cases, spreadsheets have been touted as the preferred option, where it can be faster to drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste data across multiple fields, without the lag in processing time that comes with many commercial solutions.
Certainly, for KeydIn, the enhanced Gantt chart performance is the key to overall user satisfaction with its software. As the press release for this enhanced functionality notes, the Gantt chart is at the intersection of resource and critical path data; and superior Gantt performance is key to holding these different data points together: “With the new version of KeyedIn Projects, added resource management functionality enables companies…to tailor resource planning to fit their business model. Users can view combined resources from the top down, assign resources to projects, and then use the Gantt chart to assign tasks to the resource to make sure they’re in complete alignment.”
Our Take
Certainly, drawing Gantt charts is the most recognizable and quintessential of project management activities. However, historically the ability (or, more accurately, inability) of project managers to keep task plans up to date has made it one of the most questionable in terms of adding value to overall project throughout. An activity that is meant to dictate how people spend their time in the future is often something that is done retroactively, to reflect how time was spent in the past.
The superior Gantt chart performance offered in KeyedIn Projects 6.4 is a positive development towards changing this narrative. The improved processing times certainly bring the promise of a better user experience, and a more up-to-date and holistic project portfolio forecast. While KeyedIn has yet to appear in SoftwareReviews’ Data Quadrant, it’s an increasingly competitive player in the project management space. I look forward to seeing its appearance soon.
Source: SoftwareReviews, Screenshot December 2019.
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