Been killing myself this past year to get a comprehensive set of management tools for a small rapidly growing business that will give me the insight, tracking and planning of Gantt and keep track of important data.

Started with Trello which was awesome to get the management together and online quickly and easily. We doubled in production and quickly lost progress overview, so I ported to dapulse which allowed me the ability to show project progress on one page and to add all the necessary files that flow with it.

Along with these I would use TeamGantt which was great when I had the luxury of sitting and breaking each project into bite-sized parts, but quickly got unwieldy and due to the inability to reduce to the resolution of parts of day as well as tracking limitations, this tool fell into disuse and I had to use Ganttic to track daily progress after the fact. We have been running without a head for a while, relying on the overview that dapulse gives. Not bad, but not enough.

About a month ago I found AirTable and I am convince that this will evolve into a breakthrough product – it is a relational database that functions as excel. It is as simple as it is strong and has finally given me the power of database without having to dedicate my whole life to manage the database. I can export data from any app, create a new tab and then set the columns to reference existing data sets without any loss of integrity and all the data gets updated in the relevant tables! I give this program a year for broad awareness and 2 years to get the functionality up to the demands and we should start seeing templates that answer to any need.

Today I found the perfect answer to Gantt and I am struggling to understand why it isn’t sprawled across the web: GamePlan.global. It is the most obvious and intuitive approach to Gantt that could possibly be… It’s simplicity is it’s strength and you just get right into the planning with no looking back – it automatically creates your Gantt and hilights your critical path with zero effort. There is no file association ability that I can see, but I have no doubt that I will be using this daily from now on and I will be surprised if this doesn’t increase productivity in the very near future and reduce the number of apps that keep me organised.

I believe that we can double in size again within the next month…