Liquidplanner Review

LiquidPlanner is a simple but powerful alternative to Microsoft Project. It offers task management, project scheduling, and team collaboration in one central place. And unlike other tools out there, LiquidPlanner helps teams manage change and uncertainty

Why LiquidPlanner?

There are many project management applications on the market, but none that offer the scheduling innovations LiquidPlanner does. LiquidPlanner is ideal for teams who want the scheduling capabilities of sophisticated project software but need a simple, easy-to-use tool that everyone can access.

LiquidPlanner Project Management Software Overview

LiquidPlanner is a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) project management software solution. LiquiPlanner’s key features include:

• task management

• probabilistic scheduling

• professional time tracking

• resource balancing

• personalised dashboards

• integrated commenting

• project documentation

LiquidPlanner Key Features

Probabilistic Scheduling

Liquidplanner offers quite a unique (well it isn’t really anything new, we have been doing this technique for project estimating schedule effort and budget in excel and MS projects for years.) approach to estimating effort. Basically, LiquidPlanner calculates a weighted average effort estimation. You simply provide your best case and worst case guesses of how long each task might take and Liquidplanner does the rest.

This approach offers improved accuracy over traditional scheduling techniques, for more information on how to do this using excel, then see my earlier post on project estimation. LiquidPlanner offers an easy to use Gantt chart view, if you’re looking for project management software and an integrating Gantt chart is a must have feature, then Liquidplanner needs to be in your to 10 to review and trial.

However, if you are running fairly complex projects with multiple dependencies, then Liquidplanner may not be powerful enough for your use case. One of LiquidPlanner’s biggest constraints is that it can only go 3 level deep in the WBS.

Dynamic Gantt Charts

Resource utilisation out of the box, when a user updates a task early or flags that the task is going to take them longer, LiquidPlanner automatically corrects and updates the gantt chart, this is a great time saver and gone are the days where the project manager spends half the day on friday updating his Gantt chart.

LiquiPlanner uses an intuitive interface that allows bulk uploading of entries so getting the data in, is not a problem and for only a few dollars per user per month, offers great value for a business new to project management, and for most, simply capturing your projects in a Gantt chart is going to offer great value to your project managers and clients.

Reporting

LiquidPlanner offers a suits of reports out of the box, these reports are generally focussed around schedule and resource utilisation. Reports will typically show you:

• Baseline Report – What has actually happened against the planned schedule
• Resource Utilisation – What resources are over/under utilised and how is cause schedule slippage
• Burn Down – tracks tasks complete against what was planned and forecasts new completion dates based on performance to date

These reports out of the box will suit most small business project requirements off the shelf. Further to this, all report data is easily exported into excel format so you can manipulate it to your hearts desire in excel.

Limitations

The schedule is based on priority order, so by default the task that is higher in the order list than other tasks will be scheduled to be done first, this is great for basic waterfall projects but projects with many complex dependencies and tranches, LiquiPlanner starts to become cumbersome.

all in all, it is a great tool and we have implemented this successfully into multiple companies with great success. If you would like project management software consulting for your business then feel free to get in touch.