As a software manager, I lived with the wrath of Gantt charts and Microsoft Project schedules for too many years. They get in the way of making progress, and they get in the way of your relationships with your staff, peers, managers, executives and directors, and most importantly, your customers. The world doesn’t need another scheduling tool. Have they not been listening to Kathy Sierra?

Setting up Junctionbox Media helped throw Gantt out of my life. Furthermore, the tools and techniques we use now – major shout-out to Ruby on Rails – almost demand that you ignore Gantt, because there are easier ways to schedule and prioritise work.

It’s somewhat ironic then, that I discovered a thread today discussing how to implement Painless Software Schedules (PSS). This article by Joel Spolsky was written back in March 2000, and it’s still relevant today. It suggests using Microsoft Excel as a basis of scheduling, and includes some useful advice on what not to forget and how to estimate. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that a job that needs to be scheduled is wholly understood so as to make such a schedule valuable. Hence the rise in agile software techniques, which we use (and it’s feasible to use PSS for each timebox).

But where’s the irony, you ask? It’s here: discussing how to subtract two columns of numbers in Excel.