Year View
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Ian Tam
It would be nice if Timeline View could extend to Yearly View. Currently it is only up to monthly. Commercial Leases are usually contracted in years not in days/weeks/months. Having a timeline view in years will help strategically when we should sign leases, eliminating gap periods. An excellent but simple risk management tool to have for a business.
Nate Montgomery @ SmartSuite
Merged in a post:
Additional Date Range for Timeline and Gant views
J
Jean-Marcel Nicolai
Gant and Timelines views are limited to "months" as the longest date range - It would be good to add Quarters and Years (potentially 5 years just like Air Table) to improve data visibility especially on large projects
Jon Darbyshire
Hey Jean-Marcel Nicolai, thanks for your feedback! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you provide more details on how you envision the 'Quarters' and 'Years' date range to function in the context of your projects?
- What specific benefits do you anticipate from having a 5-year view similar to Air Table?
- Are there any specific large projects where the current 'months' date range limitation has been a significant issue?
J
Jean-Marcel Nicolai
Hello Jon Darbyshire - Thanks for the quick feedback. Regarding your questions, here is a bit of context and then the answers.
As a Videogame publisher we work on several projects at the same time. These projects range from 9M to 2-3Y of dev & Liveops periods. We use two major views. A portfolio/roadmap view for which the quarterly, yearly or multiyear views are perfect. We also use the detailed view which is covered today with the current date range in Smartsuite.
Regarding the questions:
#1 Quarters and years would just be another Date Range option that will provide a visual "Zoom out" to get a birds eye view on the projects and how they interact with each other from a long term planning perspective.
#2 Same as the above - As our projects are mostly multi-years the 5 year perspective can give us an overall view of the entire portfolio of projects without the necessity to scroll left and right to see the entire picture.
#3 There are different personas accessing our Gants (or timelines). The Videogame producers and project managers. They are working at the phase / task levels and can do their job with the current date range. Then the Executive Producers and the rest of the leads (as well as the management teams) juggle between different phases for the same projects / products and need to work with those long term views.
To summarize my trail of thoughts on Gant capabilities - Gant should act as a perfect visual representation of the different projects/products, their key phases, their milestones and their date ranges. (Otherwise people stay on Excel or Grid views which, IMHO is a major problem for project visibility and collaboration) - If the visual representation is limited then it limits the Gant value itself - I know that it is difficult to bring all the different visual representations especially with Agile vs V methods or hierarchical WBS and you guys are already doing a very good job but I just thought that those date range would be a great +.
I Hope it makes sense and happy to discuss !