When I first started graduate school, a technological century ago, all our class presentations and lab meetings were prepared on overhead projector transparencies. It was impossible to put a presentation together at the last minute, unless you wanted to be super low-tech (read: slacker) and draw everything on the transparency by hand with overhead markers instead of printing the presentation on the transparencies from a computer ahead of time.

About a year in, LCD projectors became commonplace and bulky transparencies and overhead projectors were replaced by PowerPoint presentations. PPT seemed so formal, so fancy, so new. I loved it. It turned out that I am just the right type of OCD/anal-retentive person to love everything about putting together PPT* presentations. I line everything up meticulously and perfectly. I can spend an hour making sure that font on every slide is the same size. I love making animations and drawing overly complex yet boxy and bulky illustrations.

Imagine my disappointment when the end of my lab work brought with it an end to PowerPointing. No more presentations to give, no more slides, no more hours spent matching colors and text angles. That is, not until the wonder that is the Gantt chart entered my sad OCD life.

My company has had a rush of private clients lately, most of which are small bioengineering companies desperate for government research funds. Accordingly, for the last month, I have become a grant writer extraordinaire, writing the grants for the company scientists who a) don’t write well, b) don’t want to write, c) can afford to pay a company to do the writing for them. With grants, come Gantt charts. Gantt charts are a required component of most government grants. They are project management tools, which show a timeline of the work you propose to do and what you hope to accomplish at each step. The charts is a snapshot of the work, of the ideas and goals. Gantt charts are hardly ever used for NIH grants, as far as I can tell, but they are required for small business grants like the ones offered by the Department of Defense (Navy, DARPA, etc) and other organizations (BARDA, other acronyms, etc). Some companies buy expensive software packages to construct Gantt charts, but not us. We stick to good old PPT, lucky for me.

Oh dear Gantt chart, how I love thee. All the lines and text and the colors! So much to line up and deliciously obsess about. The vertical lines denote each week/month/quarter of the project’s performance period (aka the fixed amount of time you will be allotted to complete the work should you be awarded the grant). The tasks (= the specific aims) are represented by the blue boxes spanning the time period they will take to complete. The milestones listed on the right describe what you hope to have accomplished at the end of each task. The chart gives the grant reviewer an overview of the entire project, its feasibility, its significance and contribution, all in one easy to digest perfectly-formatted bite.

Gantt charts are a wonderful thing to behold and fun to put together (for someone as OCD as myself), but unfortunately, I see no place for them in basic biology research grants. There is no way to predict how long it will take to prove/disprove a hypothesis, no way to say with any certainty when work on Specific Aim X will be completed (although how wonderful it would be if you could!). Engineering and technology firms get to have all the Gantt fun, it would seem. At least for the time being, until someone figures out an alternate strategy for project management in a lab – one that has deadlines and realistic goals, and achievable bite-size milestones. And PowerPoint slides. Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.

*I know that PPT is far from an optimal tool presentation design tool, but I am OCD in a completely non-technology-aware way.