I have this love-hate thing going on with Gantt charts. In small-to-medium sized engagements, my experience is that they're a nice pre-sale showpiece that get tossed for an Excel spreadsheet once execution begins.

Why is that? I tend to think a couple of things are at play.

First, Gantt charts look great at the outset, as you get a nice visual overview of the work at hand. The problem is that maintenance of the chart becomes a major piece of overhead as the inevitable scope changes make their way into your project. Clients don't like to pay extra for a high priced PM (keep in mind, smaller services firms don't have project coordinators to do the monkey work) to be making changes to a Microsoft Project file. Project Managers don't like to be bogged down with time-consuming trivial edits to the Project file, when there are more critical day-to-day issues to tackle. In other words, it's a lose-lose maintenance situation.

Second, Microsoft Project files, with their Gantts, become hard to consume once the project starts. As one Project Director once told me, they're "too hard for the client, and you always end up going back to passing spreadsheets back and forth." Someone I know was recently working with his client's "seasoned" project manager on a plan, and that project manager had absolutely no clue how to use Microsoft Project. Exchanging Project files can be a pain, especially if someone is using an older version. Excel, on the other hand, is ubiquitous and everyone knows how to use it.

So these two points explain why Gantts are not on the near-term feature roadmap for Ticket Agent. If anything, it might show up as a reporting option, but unlike many other SAAS work management tools, it's not an integral piece of the puzzle. This is a philosophical thing. I'm not trying to create a "me too" product. Contrary to how Microsoft does things, a piece of software can't be everything to everyone. There are many excellent Gantt-based SAAS solutions, I'm not trying to go after that market.

Ticket Agent is designed to be a "back to basics" project management for small-to-medium sized projects. You aren't expected to be a PMP/PMBOK type of person to run the project. You have projects, deadlines, and units-of-work (i.e., tickets) that need to be completed. Ticket Agent will help you create those status reports that you hate creating on a weekly and monthly basis.