Is there an online Gantt chart tool that works to the hour?

June 10, 2020 12:09 AM

We use Gantt for project management across two time zones, however every tool that we've seen only seems to support milestones to the day, and we need to enter them to the hour and then have those hours translate across different time zones depending on the other parties involved. With all the standalone Gantt tools and Gantt support in popular PM apps, are there any that support this more granular type of use, or should we be using another method or scheduling tool?
posted by LongDrive to Work & Money (5 answers total)

One tool that does allow scheduling by the hour over multiple time zones would be a meeting scheduler - like the one in Outlook etc. If I want to schedule a call for 10am my time, I can use the scheduling function to see if somebody else is blocking my time slot - even though their local time may be different to mine. I can schedule a collaborative task for a time when we are both available. There are some project management tools which include both Gantt based task schedulers and internal calendars.
posted by rongorongo at 12:17 AM on June 10, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks Rongorongo! Just to clarify for future commenters, the reason we use Gantt is because these are quite complex projects with multiple tasks and dependencies and many times they are often moving, so having conditional tasks to allow for movement/flexibility as well as nesting multiple tasks within a certain milestone are all things Gantt does exceptionally well and we would like to retain if possible.
posted by LongDrive at 12:55 AM on June 10, 2020

OK - the following may help then: here are some instructions on how to configure the "One Pager" task scheduling tool to show a Gantt by hours.

And here is somebody who is assembling his Gantt chart using Excel - also with a view of modelling task and resource by hours - a little complex to set up (and lacks dependency chains, I believe) but one potential solution.
posted by rongorongo at 1:45 AM on June 10, 2020

If you have complex projects with lots of dependencies it might be time to upgrade to Primavera P6, the mother of all scheduling programs. The downsides are the insane licensing costs and the program complexity, but there is no other scheduling software that is as complete.

Oh, and you can define tasks all the way down to fractions of seconds.
posted by hwyengr at 5:48 AM on June 10, 2020

Best answer: P6 user here, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. :) It has its benefits in enterprise scenarios, but man is it a dinosaur.

If you are looking for professional project management that can do all you are looking for, I would look to Microsoft Project. It's a bit more user friendly than P6, definitely cheaper, and I believe it is part of the Microsoft online toolkit. I typically don't recommend Microsoft utilities too often, but Project is a decent utility for this purpose.
posted by wile e at 11:12 AM on June 10, 2020