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.
Nov 02 2013
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Who Wrote This Article? ...(It was: 
File sharing is an important aspect of project management,
and remote desktop sharing feature in today’s conferencing solution is
highly beneficial in this regard. This is what makes agile project management different from traditional project planning methods – each
team leader has license to create their own plan and ascertain the materials they need, rather than having the project manager tell them what to do.
Collabor8online provides online project management –
the easy way.
Thanks for your comments, while file sharing is important, it is the project collaboration that is key in today’s projects and drives the most value. I see remote desktop files sharing, not as important as we move to more cloud and collaborative platforms in the future.
LiquidPlanner is a great tool but you should also checkout Proofhub (www.proofhub.com). It is easy to use and offers features like file sharing, time tracking, gantt charts, online proofing, milestones, to-do’s, task management and more.
Tom,
Thanks for that link, i’ll check it out!
I am sure the top contenders are always good, I had used Basecamp for more than two years and Quickbooks for more than 5 years now, but there has been some drastic changes in these software’s which made me look out for alternatives often.
I remember looking out for a replacement for Quickbooks when they stopped their time tracking and billing features. They did offer various other tools which can be integrated with Quickbooks, which actually gave me an option – Replicon, which is a good time tracking and billing tool and it integrates well with QB too.
Moreover, I started a project management software trial with Replicon and its going fine too. These alternatives does seem wonderful. So, I would suggest others not just to look for top software, but also those which are new and having great revolutionary features.
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.
Our company recently started implementing Liquid Planner for scheduling. I have found it to be very daunting for a complex schedule (approximately 210 tasks, multiple dependencies and deliverables working in tandem in order to meet a scheduled end date). Due to the fluid nature of resource scheduling and multiple PM’s managing their projects within the system, my dates are constantly in flux. In order to prevent key dates moving, I have had to anchor the schedule with milestones and events. The time it has taken to put together the schedule is exponential as compared to say using Microsoft Project. The export feature is a joke in my opinion – have yet to figure out if I can export and quickly show dependencies (and I don’t mean the dots before/after in the gantt chart view but actual detail for each task’s dependencies). The manual work I have had to put into the schedule by editing each task is beyond frustrating and extremely cumbersome. I can see how LP would be great for smaller-scale projects but for larger, more complex projects, I am finding LP falls flat on its face.