Gantt Chart Snapshots Users - Your Feedback Needed ❗️

I use it when planning a project to schedule deadlines and milestones. It's great to be able to send these to the client. An easy and professional way to show the planing of things.

We use to have as reference of what the baseline schedule was and what it is now.  It would be helpful to be able to see the baseline date and the current date in one view and choose which baseline dates to display.  i.e. baseline dates on 1/1/2022 as compared to now, baseline dates on 4/1/2022 as compared to now and what specific task to display, such as just the milestones.  

We primarily snapshots when sharing project updates with clients / non-Wrike users. They are very handy to link to from emails or a SharePoint page with additional project details (slides, overview, etc.). That said, I do find it a bit of a maintenance chore to always generate new ones each week. And I usually mess it up the first few times and have to go back and hide/display certain columns. Would be great if there were other ways to configure and auto-update. The external view of calendars is set-it-and-forget-it so those work fantastic for us.

Our team uses snapshots all the time to give clients a timeline. We created a custom field called "client project milestone" that only shows client facing tasks of our larger project and are able to take a snapshot of that. We like this feature because it's less static than the PDF export for clients and you can look at previous snapshots to see how the timeline has changed over time. I would say if there's going to be new capabilities rolled out/experimentation, just to make sure you keep the ability to give clients a timeline deliverable.

A feature with snapshots I'd like to see is if we could automatically generate and send snapshots to clients like a report. 

For us, it would be really great to be able to select more specifically what is shared in the snapshot with a simple tick-box menu or similar.

We often have gantt chart view with a LOT of detailed task and sub-task information below the milestones and top level task/project stage durations, but client does not need to see all of this (nor do we want to share).

Being able to fine-tune exactly what is and is not included in the snaphot with a few quick and simple check-box style clicks would be very valuable to us.

Great feedback, huge thanks for sharing, everyone! 🙌

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

I agree with a lot of what was said above. I share snapshots of Gantt charts with some of my clients as progress updates each week, and also wish that it was easier to manipulate what information is shared in the snapshots. One issue I've had is that often the due date that we want to share with the client is different than the deadline we schedule internally... part of the whole underpromise and overdeliver thing as I'd rather get things to them 'early' or 'on time' than late.

The workaround that I've used for doing this is adding a subtask with the client deadline (usually called 'send' or something) for each task in projects I'd like to share with my clients, and then setting the due date of that sub task to the date I'd like to share with the client. Unlike the custom field option that Ben Thomas mentioned above, this makes the bar on the Gantt Chart line up with the client due date so long as the subtask is collapsed under the main task. Since the live functionality would allow the client to expand that task and see two separate due dates, I generally end up sending screenshots of the Gantt chart with those tasks collapsed.

It would be helpful for me if I could create a custom Delivery Date field that could be used in the way the 'Due Date' field is used in the current deadline to stretch the progress bar on the Gantt Chart. That way I could use a clean Gantt Chart that illustrates Start Date and Due Date internally, and share a clean Gantt chart that illustrates Start Date and Delivery Date externally. It would also make it easier to set these tasks up in table view.

Thanks a lot for such detailed feedback Dan Bowden, and welcome to the Community 👋

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Some of the feedback here goes back to the issue of not having real Gantt chart reports. If we could generate a real report like in other apps (MS Project), we wouldn't need to jump through these hoops to provide the information we want to give to our clients. We wouldn't have to take screenshots. We wouldn't have to find workarounds to hide data.

One thing that I noticed when trying to share snapshots of Gantt charts was that you can't share the baseline comparison. I wanted to share the Gantt chart with an external colleague from a partner company in order to track the offset between baseline snapthos and current schedule. This is not possible. What good is sharing the snapshots if you don't have a way of comparing it (baseline) to the current schedule? This should be an option.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback Jason Pontius, I've now sent it to Ilia and his Product team who owns Gantt Chart snapshots and is doing the research at the moment 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover