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The Gantt That Runs Your Meetings — Priority Buckets, Live Drag, and Auto-Scheduler

Glen Bradford7 min read

Every project team has the same Monday morning ritual: pull up the slide deck, read the status column, repeat the same three questions. “What’s blocked?” “Who’s on it?” “When does it land?” The answers exist. They’re just buried across Slack threads, spreadsheets, and whatever you last updated before the holiday weekend.

The Gantt chart we shipped in Delivery Hub is built to fix that — not by being a better slide, but by being the meeting itself. Live data. Live drag. Live decisions.

The Problem With Every Other Gantt

Traditional Gantts are read-only artifacts. You export from Jira, paste into a slide, and by the time you present it the data is wrong. Or you pay for a dedicated tool that requires a separate login, a CSV import, and a 45-minute onboarding call just to move a task.

Neither of those is useful in a standup. You can’t drag a bar and say “okay, let’s move testing to the right two weeks” and have the system immediately recalculate the schedule. Until now.

Priority Buckets: NOW / NEXT / PLANNED / PROPOSED

The biggest UX breakthrough in this Gantt is automatic priority bucketing. Instead of a flat list where everything looks equally important, the timeline groups your backlog into four tiers:

NOW

Active sprint — in flight, blocked, or just started

NEXT

Queue — ready to start as soon as capacity opens

PLANNED

Committed — has dates, waiting its turn

PROPOSED

Backlog — idea or request, not yet scheduled

Tasks are auto-classified based on their status and dates. But you can also set an explicit priority override on any task — dragging something to the NOW bucket immediately promotes it regardless of its scheduled start date.

Children inherit their parent’s bucket by default. So when you decide a whole feature is “NEXT,” every sub-task follows automatically. You can still override individual items if you need finer control.

Drag-and-Reparent: Live Decisions in Standups

Every bar on the timeline is draggable. Move it left or right to shift the schedule. Drag it vertically to change its position. Slide it left to change its tree depth — moving it under a different parent task (we call this reparenting).

The depth control is calibrated to 25px per level — enough to feel intentional without being finicky. Want to pull a sub-task up to the top level? Drag it left 50px. Want to nest it two levels deep? Drag right 50px.

In practice this means you can run a standup by having the Gantt on a shared screen and saying “let’s pull transaction migration up before testing.” Drag it. It’s there. The room sees it update in real time.

Auto-Scheduler With a Named Resource Pool

Click “Auto Schedule” and the system works through your backlog in priority order, assigns each task to the least-busy available team member, skips weekends, and lays out a realistic calendar.

You define the resource pool once — team member names and their monthly capacity in hours. The scheduler respects those constraints. No more hand-drawing capacity plans in Excel.

Parent task dates roll up automatically: a parent’s start is the earliest child start, its end is the latest child end. Move one child and the parent bar updates immediately.

Six View Modes — All the Same Data

The Gantt bar view is the headline, but it’s one of six ways to look at the same project data:

  • Gantt Timeline bars with drag, reparent, and dependency arrows
  • List Flat table sorted by priority — fast for bulk status review
  • Treemap Area-proportional view — instantly see where your team hours are concentrated
  • Bubbles Scatter plot of effort vs. priority — find the quick wins
  • Calendar Week-by-week view of what’s landing when
  • Flow Sankey-style view of items moving through workflow stages

WIP Detection and Done-Item Windows

Items that have logged hours and a start date in the past are automatically flagged as “in flight.” Only the remaining hours get projected forward — the actual start date is preserved. You see reality, not wishful thinking.

Completed items stay visible in the active view for 30 days after close. This matters for standups — you can see what shipped last week alongside what’s in progress. After 30 days they drop to the “done” view automatically.

It’s Open Source. It’s Free.

The Gantt ships as part of Delivery Hub — a free, open-source Salesforce app. You install the package, your data flows in, and you have a live priority-driven timeline in your Salesforce org. No per-seat fees, no export-to-slide ritual, no external logins.

The implementation is the cost. If you want Cloud Nimbus to set it up, configure your workflow types, and get your team running standups from this — that’s what we do.