Exploring the benefits of Gantt chart software in Backlog

Regardless of the industry your business operates in, delivering your best work to a client requires meticulous planning and execution. When juggling several complex projects with cross-functional teams, multiple stakeholders, and countless moving pieces, the right project management tools can make all the difference.

Backlog offers a comprehensive suite of features to streamline project planning and workflows, foster collaboration, and drive success. In particular, Its intuitive Gantt chart is a game-changer for teams seeking to streamline project timelines and ensure efficient delivery. 

With Backlog’s Gantt chart software, teams can better manage their project timelines and allocate resources more effectively, ensuring they continue to make progress toward their goals. We will walk you through all of Backlog’s Gantt chart features and demonstrate how you can start using Backlog to improve your team’s workflows. 

Want to follow along? Set up your free Backlog account today and start creating your own Gantt charts in Backlog: we can’t wait to see where they take you!

What are Gantt charts?

Gantt charts are project management tools that organize all of the tasks involved in a project along a visual timeline. They clearly and concisely represent project tasks, milestones, and dependencies. 

In other words, they make planning, scheduling, and tracking progress easier. Any stakeholder who’s involved in a project can instantly get a comprehensive overview of project schedules, resource allocation, and deadlines. Everything is arranged into easy-to-understand horizontal bars, making it easy to understand progress at a glance. 

Gantt charts have been indispensable tools in project management since Henry Gantt introduced them over a century ago. Today, they’re one of the most popular ways to manage project tasks and schedules.

The popularity of Gantt charts isn’t without good reason. In fact, there are numerous benefits to using Gantt charts. 

Gantt charts facilitate: 

• Effective communication among team members, stakeholders, and clients
• Consistent understanding of project timelines, milestones, and expectations
• Proactive resource management and risk mitigation
• Streamlined progress monitoring
• Data-driven project management decisions

In short, they’re the ultimate tool to keep your project team organized and efficient.

Backlog’s intuitive Gantt chart software

In Backlog, your Gantt chart is seamlessly integrated into each project, allowing you to manage your team’s tasks more effectively. 

This powerful visual tool seamlessly integrates with Backlog’s comprehensive project management features, enabling you to plan, schedule, and manage each project clearly and efficiently.

With real-time progress monitoring and drag-and-drop timeline adjustments, teams can proactively identify and address potential bottlenecks, ensuring projects stay on track and deliverables are met on time, every time. 

To enable Gantt charts in your projects, just have a Project Administrator select Enable charts under Project Settings.

Enabling this feature will also allow you to input your issue start and due dates and estimate the hours each will take for more detailed scheduling and resource allocation. Once you’ve enabled the feature, Gantt charts will automatically be created for all your projects, provided you’ve correctly configured all your tasks in a clear chronological order.

Combined with the platform’s comprehensive project management functionality, Backlog’s Gantt chart feature streamlines collaboration, boosts productivity, and simplifies complex project timelines. This makes it easier to drive successful project outcomes. 

Simplifying complex project timelines with Backlog’s Gantt chart software

Managing project timelines can be a daunting task. Whether you’re facing unexpected obstacles that complicate your timeline, inconsistent client feedback, shifting priorities, or have slim resources, you need all the planning assistance you can get. 

That’s where Backlog comes in. Backlog’s easy-to-understand Gantt charts simplify your project planning and management by bringing all the most pertinent project data into one intuitive dashboard. 

On Backlog’s Gantt chart, teams can easily schedule tasks, adjust timelines, and monitor progress, ensuring projects stay on track and deliverables are met on time. 

For example, Droisys Inc. needed a project management solution that could accommodate complex projects while minimizing their volume of emails and spreadsheets. Backlog’s Gantt chart enabled their project managers to plan upcoming projects more efficiently while also keeping a close eye on the status of their current initiatives.

As a result, their productivity increased, and their communication got easier—even across time zones. 

So, how can you leverage these kinds of benefits for your own team?

Here’s an example.

Let’s say your software development team is planning a new mobile application with multiple features and releases. 

Leveraging Backlog’s Gantt chart, you start by mapping out all the tasks involved—design, coding, testing, and deployment—along the proposed project timeline, keeping in mind resource availability and dependencies. 

As you lay out your timeline, you suddenly realize that several tasks depend on one another to progress. In other words, your project has a series of task dependencies.

With Backlog, you can handle this easily. Just use the convenient subtasking feature to nest your dependent tasks, ensuring that everyone understands the relationship between them. 

Laying out all of the tasks associated with your project in this way makes it far easier to identify potential bottlenecks in advance—such as a shortage of QA testers during a critical phase—and proactively address them. 

Make these dependent tasks visible on your Gantt chart by selecting Enable subtasking under Project Settings. 

But as any project manager knows, as much as you try to plan ahead, it’s simply impossible to account for everything. When unexpected obstacles crop up—for example, one of your key developers unexpectedly goes on leave, throwing off your resource allocation—you can use the Gantt chart to pivot to a new approach quickly. Just click through the issue details to reassign the task, and drag and drop along your Gantt timeline to adjust the schedule.

Whether everything is going smoothly or your project is starting to fall behind, you can use your Gantt chart to monitor progress. Backlog’s Gantt chart integrates seamlessly with the platform’s version and milestones feature, enabling you to map each milestone out on your project timeline and analyze your team’s progress toward achieving it. 

But that’s not all. Backlog also helps you customize your workflow by creating new task statuses and color-coordinating them for easy identification. This color coordination appears on your Gantt chart so you can see where each task stands at a glance and adjust your deadlines or resource allocation accordingly.

To customize your workflow, access the Status menu under Project Settings. 

With these powerful features, you can simplify your project scheduling, ensure efficient resource allocation, communicate more effectively, and deliver on time. 

Enhancing collaboration and productivity

If you want your project to succeed, your team needs to collaborate seamlessly and communicate clearly. The tools you use should be one of the greatest enablers of that, not a roadblock to your success. Backlog’s Gantt chart tools foster collaboration by providing a centralized platform where teams can align on project timelines and coordinate their efforts, regardless of where team members are based. 

With real-time visibility into project schedules and task assignments, team members can stay informed and aligned, reducing the risk of miscommunication, uneven workloads, or duplicated efforts. 

Imagine that your marketing team is planning a multi-channel campaign launch to announce the release of a new product. With a shared Gantt chart in Backlog, your team’s content creators, designers, and social media managers can easily coordinate their respective tasks and timelines, minimizing conflicts and ensuring a more cohesive rollout. 

Moreover, consolidating all project-related information and tasks within a unified system makes it easier for the team to stay connected. For example, if the design process for a key asset faces a delay, all the team has to do is click and drag to adjust the project timeline. The updated deadlines will instantly reflect for the whole team—whether they’re looking at the Gantt chart or not. Need to communicate more complex data? 

Just click through to the issue details page, leave a comment, and tag everyone who needs to know. It’s that simple. 

And that’s not all. Backlog also helps you stay organized on an individual level, with personal Gantt charts focused specifically on your unique workload across all projects. Just click your profile icon in the Global Navigation and select Gantt chart.

This helps you manage your deadlines and balance your most critical tasks, even if you’re part of several project teams.

Backlog’s Gantt chart software also eliminates the need for multiple tools and platforms, limiting the opportunities for misunderstandings and miscommunication. Imagine updating your project tracker in one place, only to have other tools remain out-of-date, sending mixed messages to your team. 

But with Backlog, you no longer have to worry about that. Instead, your team can focus on executing tasks efficiently rather than wasting time double-checking between data sources or jumping between apps. 

Ensuring timely project deliverables

When using Backlog Gantt charts, your team will find it easier to set realistic timelines and milestones, ensuring projects stay on track and deliverables are met as scheduled. 

For example, let’s say your team is working on a new cloud infrastructure project with a tight go-live deadline. With Backlog, you can map out all the necessary tasks on the project’s dedicated Gantt chart, including server provisioning, data migration, and user acceptance testing. 

If you notice that the testing phase is scheduled too close to the final project deadline, you can easily adjust the timeline in advance or allocate additional resources to ensure a smooth and timely delivery.

Here are a few tips to ensure your project timelines are as realistic as possible: 

• Ensure every task has a start date, end date, and estimated hours. Without this information, the task will not appear on your Gantt chart timeline and may fall through the cracks.
• Associate each task with a relevant milestone. This will help your team understand how their work contributes to the project’s overall success and give everyone clear checkpoints to track overall progress. 
• Leverage subtasking for more granular issue tracking. By breaking your issues down into a series of parent and child issues, you can make complex tasks more manageable, enable your team to collaborate more effectively and gain more visibility into the team’s overall progress.
• Review your project timeline regularly. By staying connected to the pulse of your project, you’ll spot and resolve delays faster, making it easier for your team to achieve even the most ambitious deadlines.
• Hold regular retrospectives. During these meetings, you can discuss your projected versus actual task timelines, adjust your current project timeline, and fine-tune your estimations for future projects.

In summary, by setting clear timelines upfront, monitoring task progress, and identifying potential delays, you and your team can make informed decisions about prioritization, resources, or project scope to ensure critical deliverables are met on time.

Integrating Backlog with other Nulab tools 

Backlog seamlessly integrates with Cacoo, Nulab’s versatile diagramming tool, enabling you to depict your project timeline, create wireframes, visualize data, and more. 

In fact, Cacoo even has dedicated Gantt chart templates. You can use these to depict your timeline in client presentations for more seamless communication.

Any diagram you create can easily be embedded into Backlog projects and tasks. 

This integration streamlines collaboration, as team members can reference and discuss visual assets alongside the corresponding Gantt chart timelines and task details, fostering a shared understanding and minimizing context-switching. 

Nulab Pass, Nulab’s identity and access management solution, enables you to secure your entire Nulab ecosystem.

This ensures that project data, including sensitive Gantt chart information and timelines, is accessible only to authorized team members and stakeholders. 

By leveraging Nulab Pass’s robust access controls and single sign-on capabilities, teams can maintain strict security and compliance standards while collaborating efficiently on project timelines within Backlog. 

Backlog also offers integrations with various third-party tools, further enhancing its versatility and compatibility with existing workflows. These integrations include:

• Communication apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat
• Project management tools to import data from Jira, Backlog, or even spreadsheets
• Cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive
• Development tools like LambdaTest and Jenkins

Leveraging Nulab’s integrated ecosystem and third-party integrations can streamline your team’s experience by aligning your project management with your team’s preferred workflow.

This cohesive approach not only enhances productivity and efficiency but also fosters better collaboration, communication, and alignment among team members, stakeholders, and clients, ultimately driving successful project outcomes.

Best practices for using Gantt chart software in Backlog

If you want your team to make the best use of their Backlog Gantt charts, everyone must be on the same page about how to use them. 

Here are some best practices to help your team begin using Gantt charts more effectively: 

• Training: Make sure your whole team knows how to use their Gantt charts, including where to find them, how to read them, and which filters to use. Nulab has a helpful tutorial on YouTube; sharing it with your team is a great starting point.
• Planning: Clearly define and break down all project tasks, milestones, and dependencies before the project kicks off. This will help you ensure that everyone knows what to do and which responsibilities they own.
• Tracking: Set clear expectations regarding project and task tracking. Ensure the whole team regularly updates their tasks to reflect progress, delays, and changes in scope. This way, your Gantt chart will reflect the most accurate and current project timeline.
• Accuracy: Treat your Gantt chart as your project’s single, central source of truth. If all stakeholders use the same point of reference, communication will go more smoothly, and you can avoid misunderstandings. 
• Process: Integrate your Gantt chart—including reviewing and updating it—into your daily project management workflow to ensure nothing gets overlooked.

By following these best practices, you can unlock the full potential of Backlog’s Gantt chart and set your team up for success.

Plan and manage projects more efficiently with Gantt charts in Backlog

Gantt charts are a user-friendly and intuitive solution to simplify complex project timelines, enhance collaboration, and deliver better results on time. They enable teams to plan, schedule, and monitor project progress. And best of all, they help stakeholders stay aligned, reducing miscommunication. 

Backlog’s Gantt chart software streamlines project management by integrating with your entire project flow from beginning to end. Used effectively, it can help boost productivity and drive successful project outcomes. 

See for yourself. Plan your next project with a Gantt chart in Backlog!