How Do We Help Thousands of Companies Manage Their Working Processes Efficiently?
Managing a complex project that contains thousands of tasks without specially designed software tools is quite a challenging issue. Keeping in mind dozens of activities with complex relations along with employees to whom they’re assigned is a barely achievable task. Therefore, you should pay due attention to choosing proper project management software.
In this article, we’ll consider some useful features of dhtmlxGantt and dhtmlxScheduler. These JavaScript solutions allow significantly improving the efficiency of a project management process.
DHTMLX Gantt for Project Management
DHTMLX Gantt is a full-featured customizable JavaScript implementation of Gantt chart. It supports the major modern browsers and works well both on PC and mobile devices. Full drag-and-drop support allows managing tasks with ease. Among the features that you may find in almost any web-based Gantt chart application, there are some that we want to mention separately:
Resource Management
DHTMLX Gantt library provides users with different features allowing to estimate the workload of each employee involved in a project. Resource management is one of those features. It allows you to assign resources to a particular task to see the capacity and workload of projects. Such functionality allows estimating a total load of both the full project and its parts. By resources, we mean money, people, equipment, etc. Using this feature, you can assign resources and apply a specific style to the task in accordance with allocated resources. Human resources can have their own unique schedule. If you decide to re-assign particular tasks to another employee, the duration of the task and the project will be adjusted according to the new working schedule.
Using the described features, you will get the opportunity to balance the available resources more efficiently. DHTMLX Gantt can provide users with such valuable information as completeness, workload, and capacity for each resource.
Critical Path Calculation
As a project manager, from time to time you face the necessity to manage a project that contains hundreds of tasks with dozens of dependencies between them. In such a situation, it may be pretty hard to define the exact set of tasks having the most significant impact on the overall project time. The Critical Path Method is an excellent solution to this issue.
The critical path is the sequence of tasks determining the overall duration of the project. You should pay due attention to them if you want to meet your deadlines. DHTMLX Gantt library allows highlighting the critical path, which helps you to see the tasks that should not be delayed. Each highlighted bar represents a particular activity. The length of the bar corresponds to the duration of the task.
Auto Scheduling
The more complex the project you’re dealing with, the higher the value of automated scheduling tools. You can’t predict all possible difficulties awaiting you ahead. Therefore, you can face unforeseen delays causing a chain of changes in all dependent tasks. In such cases, the use of the auto scheduling feature can save you from the necessity of manual adjustments.
DHTMLX Gantt provides the mechanism that will update the start date of the dependent task in case the end date of the primary task has changed for some reason. Using this feature, you can maintain the project schedule updated by specifying relationships between the existing tasks without the need for changing dates of each task manually.
Milestones and Vertical Markers
To manage the available resources efficiently, you have to be aware of the most important dates of the project. You can mark critical events such as release date using milestones or vertical markers.
Milestones are tasks that have zero duration and are intended to mark key events or goals. For example, you can use milestones to be sure that each employee that has access to the graph is informed about the upcoming meeting or dates of expected completions:
The Vertical marker is another element of Gantt chart that allows marking dates or even date ranges:
You can use this option to mark a particular stage of a project requiring special attention of team members.
DHTMLX Scheduler for Booking & Event Scheduling
DHTMLX Scheduler is a JavaScript event calendar that provides broad customization possibilities. It’s a lightweight tool with rich JavaScript API, and multiple views support. Let’s consider some useful features of this scheduler to see how it can help you with project management.
Agenda View
If you have tons of events to manage, the tool that allows scheduling for a few days or weeks ahead will be pretty helpful. DHTMLX Scheduler allows using the Agenda view that displays a list of all upcoming events. Seeing all tasks at once, you can manage your time more efficiently. In case of any changes, you can double-click a particular task, and the editing window will appear on the screen. It’ll allow you to change the description of the task and its start and end dates.
Map View
In case your work responsibilities include a lot of movements or trips you can use the Map View in your scheduler. It will show you the list containing all upcoming events and Google Maps with markers showing the location of each event. Using this view, you can choose the most convenient way of conducting meetings in different cities or visiting branches of your company.
Recurring Events
Sometimes, the project management process involves repeating events. For example, according to the scrum management methodology, the team should participate in daily meetings. For such cases, DHTMLX Scheduler provides its users with the possibility to create recurring events. When you create a new activity, you can choose if it should be repeated daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
Timeline View
Using the Timeline View, you can visualize events horizontally. Such kind of visualization allows easily defining which tasks are assigned to which employees. Using this view, you can understand who is responsible for what and identify sources of delays.
If you have experience in using one of our components for project management and event scheduling, we would appreciate your review of them!
Leave a review of dhtmlxScheduler on G2Crowd, review platform for software & services: https://www.g2crowd.com/products/dhtmlxscheduler/take_survey
Leave a review of dhtmlxGantt on G2Crowd, review platform for software & services: https://www.g2crowd.com/products/dhtmlxgantt/take_survey
