We are not saying that a project plan cannot contain many tasks and even more task links. Suppose we can care enough to plan the thousands of tasks and relationships well. In this case, we can get a "perfect" project plan for tracking and rescheduling.
It seems that this "perfect" plan can help us automate the heavy rescheduling work. After changing the date of a task, the successors change automatically according to the link constraints. So we need less work than updating related tasks manually, because the app follows the link constraints to do the rest well.
Sounds good, but wait, let's think a bit more about this "perfect" approach.
Why do we have to put so much more effort into specifying start dates, end dates, resources, costs, and task links? Why don't we make it easy to plan the work, like managing tasks in a simple to-do list? Since the project plan is a guide (what, when, to whom, how, and how much. See why we chose the project plan app) for the project team to the project. We need to track task progress with the team and reschedule the project as . The project team needs to follow the schedule for their daily work and update the status to achieve the current plan for the upcoming days.
- Is the schedule convenient enough to update the task status when discussed with the team?
- Is the cost acceptable for management to change something when the link needs to be disconnected? It's telling when you find that you have to spend hours rebuilding the schedule to account for just one task change, because many tasks are linked, and one task impacts many others.
- We can trust the app, but can we believe the result of the rescheduling? After you change a task, the app correctly changes the date of the linked tasks. That sounds good, but do you believe the new plan is the right one with the right resource allocation, duration, and cost?
- It's super time consuming to create the perfect task links to make sure everything is correct after it's set up. The new plan still meets the balance of resources, keeps the low cost and short duration. The reality is that most of the time, we still have to manually check the result after the "perfect" links have gone into effect.
- Is the schedule a clear map in your mind? Also, can your team members get started quickly? Since we have a "perfect" and complicated schedule document, we have to review it every day before we do anything. Every time there is an unexpected change, we have to review the documents. This can take a long meeting because we don't know what is going to happen. How can the organization deal with risks and changes when the project team has no idea of the tasks ahead?
- Is it a good practice to display too many tasks together on an iOS device? QuickPlan is indeed the most fluid Gantt chart app that has no performance issues. But navigating a list with thousands of items is still not a good practice, alternatively on a Mac device?