The Worthy of Your Time Project Planner: What It Is

Short answer: A project planner is any tool that holds the plan and the work in the same place. The kind people picture — a Gantt-chart timeline — was designed for construction and fits software projects badly. For a software team, the planner you want is an iteration tracker: it holds stories, estimates them in points, and forecasts off accepted velocity, not off a bar chart. If your team is under five people, you don't need a dedicated planner at all. You need a shared backlog and one person willing to run a tight standup.

A project planner keeps the plan and the work in the same place, so nobody has to keep it all in their head. That’s the whole definition. All the other performance data is excel projections.

The issue is that most of the software sold as a project planner was built for construction crews and is being resold. Employing a Gantt chart is an ingenious method to schedule a bridge construction, but it is a strange technique to timetable a four-member app team that releases products twice a week. This article elaborates which planner actually fits a software team, which one's to skip and the question that tells you whether you need any at all.

This manual is tailored for engineers, anchors, and founders who have received “planning” without any accompanying training and would basically rather be coding. If you’re planning a wedding, you want a different article; planning a bridge, you want a different industry.

What a project planner actually is

Any tool that keeps three different things visible at the same time is a project planner.

1. What has to get done — the list of work.
2. In what order, and when — some notion of priority or sequence.
3. Whether it's on track — a feedback signal, not a vibes check.

This summarizes the full job description. A three-column spreadsheet does the trick. There is a piece of enterprise software that costs $99 per user and has 400 fields. Which option is frictionless enough for us to effectively ship product?

Every tool has a similar failure mode: rather than make the planner a thing you use, it becomes a thing you maintain. When the amount of time you spend grooming the backlog is greater than what it saves you in confusion, it’s no good. Your planner is working against you. Reduce it until it halts.

This is a mistake in most planner guides. They regard the planner as the plan. No it is not. The planner is simply a storage for the plan. The essence of the plan is to make decisions on what to build, and in what order. The tool does not decide for you; the decision is made in a conversation and recorded in a tool. When tools make decisions, it's highly likely that there is a larger issue at hand.

The three kinds of project planner, honestly described

The way it's presented in a listicle, however, there are actually three categories. All the other flavours matter less.

Template and spreadsheet planners refer to Google Sheet with task names, owners, date, and status. Appears simple, but functions surprisingly well for teams of five. Free. Although there is a low threshold, the floor is also low, allowing for less learning. Things can get complicated when a task doesn't fit neatly into a row, when points are assigned, or when simultaneous editing occurs by two or more individuals.

Task and calendar planners, such as Todoist, Microsoft Planner, Notion, Asana, and Trello. Inventory of activities, timelines, stakeholders, perhaps a kanban perspective. This is great for operations work, personal time management. Usually for a software team, they are either too lightweight (no estimation, no velocity) or too general-purpose (no structural opinion as to how a team should work).

Different agile project tracking tools are available are Jira, Linear, Shortcut, LiteTracker ( full disclosure this is the one we built) The system is designed around stories, points, versions, and a backlog. The most suitable category for software teams. Using an opinionated tool has its drawbacks. If you don't want the tool to think of the way you view work, it will fight you.

Your chosen methodology will help you determine what you want. This article will use the context of software engineering where the shape of the work is “stories delivered in iterations” and not “tasks completed on dates”. If that does not apply to you, pick a tool from either of the first two categories and ignore the rest of this.

Gantt charts are a construction tool, not a software tool

A Gantt chart is the default mental image of a project planner. Horizontal bars shifting along a timeline. This term was coined back in 1910. The design assumption dictates that work is sequential, dependencies are known upfront and the plan is a 1-month reflection of reality.

Software does not hold any of these assumptions. Software can usually be defined as a thing to build when you don’t know / haven’t nailed down the requirements, the dependencies emerge as you touch the code, and the plan is wrong by week two. Wearing a costume does not make you a superman. it looks reassuring on a status screen It conveys no actionable information.

Here are some common breakdowns you can expect.

• Dates are fiction. Every engineer told you how long their part would take, and every engineer was wrong, in the same direction, by roughly the same multiplier. The bars don't survive first contact with the first bug.
• Dependencies change weekly. Something that was going to depend on the auth service is now depending on the new state machine, which the Gantt chart has no way to represent short of a full redraw.
• The chart hides the backlog. The point of a software plan isn't when a task finishes. It's what's next. A Gantt chart is terrible at surfacing "next".
• Nobody looks at it. The PM looks at it in the status meeting. The engineers look at the ticket queue. The actual work happens somewhere Gantt doesn't live.

If your PO insists on a Gantt chart, create one once a month, make it a PDF, and carry on with the iteration planning. The graph is a management gimmick. The board defined our shared plan. Do not interchange the two.

If you are truly leading a Gantt-worthy construction-like project hardware with a firm launch date or compliance with regulator-mandated milestones, you're correct. This article is for app teams. Different work, different tool.

What a project planner needs to do for a software team

Reduce the planner question to its functions For a software team, the planner must excel at five critical tasks. Everything else weighs you down.

1. Hold a backlog of stories. Not tickets, not epics, not tasks. User-facing value, written as "a user can do X". If the tool can't tell you what a user got out of each item, it's not a planner, it's a database.
2. Assign each story a point estimate. Fibonacci-style scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 8). Not hours. Not days. Not "medium". Five buckets of relative size are plenty, and anything finer pretends to a precision software doesn't have.
3. Group stories into iterations. One-week or two-week pulls. The iteration is the unit of forecasting. Without iterations, there's no feedback loop, and the planner is just a list.
4. Track velocity on accepted stories only. Not committed, not started, not demoed. Accepted. The team's velocity is the rolling three-iteration average of accepted points, which is why Martin Fowler's XpVelocity note treats "accepted" as the only point in the pipeline worth counting. That number is what you forecast dates with, and it is the only honest signal you have.
5. Show you what's next, loudly. A planner that makes you dig three clicks to find the top of the backlog is a planner that trains you not to use it. The next story should be the most prominent thing on screen.

That's everything we need. LiteTracker uses these same elements of stories, points, iterations, velocity on accepted work. The planner’s “ultimate” functionality is described in 80% of the relevant volume. However, because enterprises prioritize sophisticated tools with intricate functionalities, they frequently experience a slowdown. You can find out how the planner works. Reference our post on daily standup as a planning meeting and guide on choosing the right iteration length for a deepened analysis of how iterations become the planner.

The four questions to ask before picking one

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Before using any kind of comparison table, honestly answer these four questions. The answers help remove a majority of the market and save you six-week migration.

1. Does the team already have a methodology?

Choose a tool designed for sprints if usage of scrum. If you are operating within XP, choose a tool that revolves around iterations and velocity. When using Kanban, select a tool with Work in Progress limits. If you haven’t chosen a methodology, pick that first the tool comes later. The Agile Manifesto's twelve principles are the shortest honest reading list before you commit.

2. How big is the team?

When users are below 5, a shared sheet will do. Choose a lightweight agile tracker with five to fifteen features. If your team count exceeds 15 or is multi-team, select a tool that supports cross-team rollups without needing a dedicated admin to maintain it. Ensure the people use the tool, do not let the tool use the people.

3. What's the implicit audience of the plan?

Select a name for the team if only the team reads the plan. When CEOs Read Your Plan: Choose a Tool Capable of Emitting a One-Page Status Without Having to Reformat It Manually Every Week. “Readable upward” is a valid selection criterion.

4. What's the migration cost from where you are now?

A mediocre tool that you can adopt on a Monday is better than a great tool whose migration will take two months. Choose tools that can be set up instantly from your current system. To be clear, migrating to LiteTracker from Pivotal Tracker or Jira is a one-minute import, not a quarter-long change-management project. When the migration path of a tool is “contact sales for a scoping call”, that constitutes the migration cost.

Don’t let screenshots fool you; if a tool lacks any of the four essentials, mark it off your shortlist. Tools that don't pass all four criteria but are aesthetically unpleasing are often the best ones to use.

Templates, apps, software — when a spreadsheet is enough

The most honest answer to “which planner tool should I use” is: the smallest one that solves the smallest problem you actually have.

There are two things worth noting about this table.

• The jump from "sheet" to "tracker" happens around four to five engineers. Below that threshold, the ceremony tax of a tool outweighs the coordination tax of a sheet. Above it, the opposite.
• The jump from "lightweight" to "full" is driven by the number of concurrent products, not the number of engineers. One product with twelve engineers is still a lightweight-tracker problem. Three products with six engineers each is already a reporting problem.

XP and Scrum flavour agile practitioners land on tracker-shaped tools once they get into iteration-based planning. LiteTracker is acclaimed as such by Capterra reviewers who say it’s loved by XP/Scrum practitioners for exactly this reason. Don't purchase anything until you know whether you're planning to run XP, Scrum, or something looser. Utilize a sheet until the kind of work you do indicates what you require.

The planner tells you nothing about the plan

The most common error is to consider planner choice as a plan. It's not.

A planner tool is a storage place. The plan is present in the decisions about what to build: which stories to split, which features to kill. Tool just records them when decisions happen in conversation — backlog grooming, standup, iteration planning meetings, and the harder work of setting a goal for the iteration itself. When your team does more work in the tool than they do on the work, change that proportion. The purpose of the planner is to shorten conversations and make them more specific; not to take them out completely.

A planning problem is never fixed by tool migration. Moving the backlog from Jira to Linear won’t help if team priorities are not aligned. The Disagreement Travels with the Data. However, a gadget cannot solve problems; it can only simplify. This holds particularly for technology. When the issue is "the PM and the engineers disagree on what matters," that's a conversation, not a configuration.

A team that has not decided what they are building will not benefit from even the best planner. Even the most incompetent planner couldn't hinder a motivated and determined team from achieving their goals.

When NOT to use a project planner

Specialized planning tools add overhead. For many teams, not having one would result in an even larger amount of coordination cost. For some, the planner is more costly to use than not. General Guiding Principle

You don't need a planner tool if:

• The team is three or fewer people. You can hold three people's work in your head, in a shared doc, or on a whiteboard. Buying a planner for three people is buying a filing cabinet to store three sticky notes.
• The product is a prototype that will be rewritten. Planning a throwaway is a waste. Build the thing. Learn. Then plan when there's a real product to plan around.
• You haven't picked a methodology yet. Pick the methodology first. The tool is downstream of that decision, and a tool chosen in the wrong order will shape the methodology it was supposed to serve.

You do need one when:

• The team is over five people and the work is pulling in more than one direction.
• The founder or anchor stops being able to hold the whole backlog in their head.
• A new engineer joins and spends their first week asking "what should I work on?" because the queue isn't visible.

We make this statement as project planners. We'd rather you not sign up for our $29/month plan with a part-time admin to maintain it if you have 4 engineers. Utilize a spreadsheet, conduct a concise standup meeting, and return when the friction becomes tangible. The free version can accommodate an unlimited number of users so that you won’t be stuck waiting for a demo call, with sign-up just a click away.

This statement is as heretical as can be in the planner-tool industry, which says more about the industry than about planning.

Frequently asked

What is a project planner?

A solution that integrates both planning and execution in the same spot, eliminating the need to juggle both in one’s mind. In practical terms a backlog of work a notion of order or priority and some feedback signal that indicates whether things are on track. The shape of the plan (spreadsheet, calendar, agile tracker) will depend on the team.

Is a project planner the same as project management software?

Not entirely no. Most of planner refers to scheduling and backlog while project management software refers to bigger set of features including reporting, resource allocation, documentation and so on. Most vendors sell themselves as both as in practice the tools overlap.

Do I need a Gantt chart for a software project?

No. Gantt charts are designed for construction, manufacturing, and industries where work is sequential and dependencies are stable. Software is not chaotic. An iteration board plus a backlog is better than a Gantt chart in every operational dimension for an app team. If executives require a Gantt, produce and use it once a month. The other 29 days ignore it.

What's the best project planner for a small software team?

A shared sheet is typically sufficient for up to five engineers. A lightweight agile tracker one built around stories, points, and iterations rather than tasks and dates for five to fifteen. The most prudent question to ask is not, "What is the best planner?" but rather, "What is the smallest planner that solves my actual problem?"

Can I use a project planner for personal productivity?

An agile tracker is not ideal unless your team is truly agile, though they work. Agile trackers are designed for teams who deliver work in increments that are ready to ship. Personal productivity is more the time-boxing of individual tasks. Different shape, different instrument.

How much should a project planner cost?

The Authentic Response: Free of Charge, Until You Outgrow Free of Charge. Most lightweight planners continue with a free version that works for small teams. If you're getting charged by number of users before you hit ten, you've been upsold. LiteTracker's free tier offers unlimited users and has no time limit and we are not alone in this, as a number of teams offer free unlimited access without a time limit.

Should the project planner also handle time tracking?

Not for a software team. It contradicts the very essence of story points to use hour-based estimation for story time tracking. If tracking time is essential, do so in a separate tool solely for billing or reporting and keep the planner clean.

How often should we re-plan?

During the brief planning meeting, which occurs at the conclusion of every iteration. Not weekly, not monthly, not quarterly. The iteration schedule is the planning schedule. Replanning is required frequently for iterations that are too long while being infrequent means your data is outdated.

Still stuck

When the methodology is chosen, the backlog is prioritised and the team knows what’s next now the planner! One may consider this the last 10% of the problem. Any tool that enforces your selected methodology will do the trick.

If you need a tracker focused on iterations, velocity, and accepted stories, without Gantt charts, demo calls or per-seat traps, LiteTracker was built for that exact purpose. A free tier for unlimited users with no expiration is available. Use the tools that suit your needs best, whether that be a sheet or a daily standup. We'd prefer that you do not pay us for friction you lack.

Whichever one the team picks, pick the practices first and let the tool fit them.