About The Developer

I'm Thomas - welcome to anyone who has found themselves on this page.

I have worked in the field of delivery of change into businesses over many years, and in many roles, including technical, project manager, delivery manager, programme manager, PMO support and many more.

A need that I have encountered many times is that of producing a good looking summary of a project plan on a single page. This has almost always been with the intention of including the visual in a slide pack either for senior stakeholders or to share with project team members.

Typically, the activity to do this either takes up many hours of time in order to get a visual which both looks good and is accurate, or is not done effectively, and PMs often end up sharing either a very high level visual of limited use, or a rolled up version of the MS Project GANTT chart or similar, which is accurate but difficult to read and limited in what it shows.

Also, updating the visual when the plan changes is very time consuming.

When I created my own visuals by hand, I would typically include the following features:
- Distinguish between milestones and activities
- Put related activities (typically phases) into different swimlanes
- Place activities on the same line in the visual to make better use of the space
- Use colour to pick out key activities such as critical path

I have experimented with various attempts at automating this process and my earliest version of this app was a Python script which used columns from an MS Project plan to indicate which activities to include in the plan where to place them, what colour they should be etc., and the script created a powerpoint deck with the activities placed as shapes onto a slide.

This went down very well with stakeholders as the visual was very easy to read, and because it was created automatically, was very accurate (i.e. start and end dates were precisely represented by the position of activities on the page.

I decide to turn my script into a web app about 2 years ago, and have been working on it ever since. It has been a bit of a roller coaster as, while I have worked as a developer before, I have never needed to write a full stack app before and so I have had to learn a raft of new skills to get this app to this point.

I'm aware that there are some aspects of the app which are a little clunky, but I believe it's at the point where it can be genuinely useful and so I'm keen to get some feedback from people to help me plan its future.

You can use the app freely, but feel free to contact me if you intend to use it and I will try to support you where required. Also feel free to make contact with any feedback or other thoughts.

Thanks you, I hope you enjoy the app.

Thomas Gaylard