Customer story

IT company uses GanttPRO’s flexibility for long-term project planning

Company industry: Media and payment transactions protection

Company passion: Location services to protect your business

Location: Vancouver, Canada

Favorite features in GanttPRO: Timeline, Virtual resources, Resource workload, Deadline management, Estimation

Who uses GanttPRO: Head of Infrastructure, DevOps project manager

Rostislav Chernichenko

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Rostislav Chernichenko is a Head of Infrastructure and Project Manager at GeoGuard.

I have tried a bunch of products. Mainly those that are based on Gantt charts. I haven’t been satisfied with lots of different things in them. Then I came across your product. And it perfectly hit the target. It was awesome!

GanttPRO offered everything that I needed plus lots of other perks. Flexible, top-notch. What I liked most is that the Gantt chart approach itself is delivered as it should be delivered, in that original way that meets my needs. I guess, the needs of the majority of professional project managers.

About company

What does your company do?

We work in the gambling sphere in the USA. We deal with geolocation and person identification. The company is headquartered in Canada.

If our product worked at full capacity in your country, I would know 100% even without video that I was talking exactly to you, not your colleague, say, support specialist.

What is your role in the company?

I am a Head of Infrastructure. But in practice, my responsibilities are wider as I am one of the project managers of the DevOps team too.

Getting started with GanttPRO

How did you start using GanttPRO?

I do not support Agile because it is for startups. We do have a serious product.

I like the philosophy behind the Gantt chart. It allows for creating long-term, big, and complex projects.

I have tried a bunch of products. Mainly those that are based on Gantt charts. I haven’t been satisfied with lots of different things in them: some did not allow assigning resources and tracking workload, some lacked basic features. It annoyed me a lot and I had a hard time trying them.

Then I came across your product. And it perfectly hit the target. It was awesome! GanttPRO offered everything that I needed plus lots of other perks. Flexible, top-notch. What I liked most is that the Gantt chart approach itself is delivered as it should be delivered, in that original way that meets my needs. I guess, the needs of the majority of professional project managers.

Previously, I used Excel or other tools to work with a Gantt chart. But when we were planning complex projects, we found GanttPRO. We were happy with it and purchased the subscription right away for all the project managers in the company.

How did you benefit from using GanttPRO?

To tell the truth, it does not matter what plans and projects you are going to manage. There is one goal - to properly distribute work to team members and resources.

With GanttPRO, we do everything right. The service perfectly allows us to see the resource workload.

What concerns me, I had three big projects. With GanttPRO, I correctly distributed the workload to the resources we had.

We successfully delivered two projects. The third one needed a break because one of our key specialists left the company. On the diagram, I was able to immediately see how sudden changes could affect the whole product.

In project management, there are 10 golden rules. One of them says: if something went wrong, the best you can do is to stop. That’s why we temporarily froze the project.

As soon as we have a new resource, with the help of GanttPRO, we’ll restore the project and continue working Right now, I am simultaneously planning four new projects. One is short-term, two are long-term. One of them takes more than two years.

In general, we have long-term projects. For example, now, we change the platform for our product. And as our investor says, one of the key goals is a forward-looking approach. We should plan 2-3 years ahead. It makes sense because the workload in long-term projects is going to expand.

Who uses GanttPRO in your company?

Project managers use the tool. Now, we still plan the workload using virtual resources. Shortly, I am planning to show GanttPRO to the team and step by step add members in our projects. I will tell them how to plan the time and activities and after that, when they will be ready to start working on the projects, I will replace our virtual resources with real team members.

Why do you personally and your company prefer the Gantt chart rather than other tools?

My personal belief is that Agile works great when you have a startup. By the way, experienced and certified (PMI, MBA) managers support this idea. Roughly speaking, it is great for situations when you move promptly from point A to point B, do it here and now.

I am experienced enough in planning and managing. I was a technical specialist, then I managed my own company, then I became a consultant. I always give a clear example of house building and tell about the processes.

What do we do to build a house? We hire an architect who designs, say, a two-story house. You plan the processes based on the number of stories: before choosing the roof, you should take into account the foundation. Then, we go on with walls and consider all the project details during the construction process. This is how the Gantt chart-based planning works.

How does Agile work? We need to build a house. Ok, let’s start with the foundation. Done. Walls come next. Maybe, we’ll add one more story? No, this is not possible because, during the first sprint, we didn’t consider that and poured concrete for the foundation of a one-story house.

Not long ago, I spoke with Chris Croft. He is one of the UK’s leading project management trainers. Chris provided lots of real examples of how projects failed because managers had chosen cool and modern Agile. It doesn’t work for big projects.
Probably, it works for outsourcing companies when a client is in charge of project management and you just get smaller tasks.

Favorite features

What GanttPRO features do you value most?

Timeline
GanttPRO greatly delivers and shows the philosophy of a Gantt chart itself. I clearly see all the tasks and dates on one timeline.
Virtual resources
I like how efficient it is to add virtual resources to your project. I can estimate and see their workload and cost. After that, I have no trouble inviting real team members to my team.
Resource workload
I can immediately see if a member participates in a few activities. GanttPRO calculates the time automatically.
Deadline management
Thanks to the email-notifications and notifications inside the tool, I can control all my dates and deadlines. Besides, it is greatly visualized on the Gantt chart timeline.
Estimation
For each resource, I can see how much time they need to complete a task.