LiquidPlanner

Comentarios: Our team is fairly small (~50 users across the company) so we do not have dedicated resources to just maintain the information in Liquid Planer. However, Liquid planner is accessible and intuitive so we can have several team members contribute to the maintenance of project schedules as part of their duties. We use Liquid Planner to manage the temporal aspects of project management. The tool is very good for what it is designed to do. There are a rich set of reporting tools that allow for customization to meet our needs. It has done this job for us very well. The support provided has been timely and effective.

Puntos a favor: The product is well designed so that it is a relatively low bar to learn how to use it effectively. It is easy for team members to interact with the software and to enter the information according to each users project role. When used as intended, the software does an excellent job providing the necessary views into project status. The software definitely lives up to its name as modifying project plans and priorities is easy and the impacts of such changes are essentially instantly available. The numerous but intuitive ways to manage project subtleties such as available time, delays, etc. make it straightforward to create realistic project schedules.

Contras: I do not have any specific negatives with respect to Liquid Planner. Like any software of this class, It does take some training and experience to get the most out of it. My best advice is to spend some time to understand how the designers intended the product to be used use it accordingly. LP has a rich set of features and if used properly will contribute positively to project management.

Comentarios: This tool is extremely powerful and robust, but like any other tool, the quality of the data which comes out of it is only as good as the data that is put into it. We attempted over the course of 12 mos. to integrate this tool into our small agency (<25 users). While simple to use, the biggest challenge was buy-in from other department captains in using the tool to its full potential.

Puntos a favor: I was very happy with the ease of use this product provided compared to some of the tools we used previously. It is built in a contemporary look and feel and is easy to navigate and manipulate data points in order to determine trends and better inform decisions. If you have the time and resources to dedicate to making sure the latest project data is always available, that is, due dates, estimated levels of effort remaining and hours logged are all kept up to date in a real-time basis, this tool has the potential to truly provide a wholistic and accurate view of the workload within an organization, along with any potential risks. The way the data are refreshed using the forecasting algorithms is a great feature which allows project managers to shift tasks around to determine how resources are affected.

Contras: Despite the name of "Liquid" Planner, there were some decidedly "unliquid" principals in which the software was built upon which power the accuracy and overall value of the product. If more then 25% of these principals are not known or regularly updated, the entire product grinds to a halt and the value it provides is completely lost. It's not a fault of how the product was built. I never encountered a time where the service/software was down or unavailable and each time I reached out to the support team they were courteous and prompt with their response. Overall, I felt frustrated by the amount of data the tool needs (and how that data need to be structured) in order for the tool to be valuable and viable. More often than not, I felt myself and the team responsible for the tool were spending more time administering the tool itself rather than using the information coming out of the tool to better our projects.

Comentarios: We are using LiquidPlanner to capture, track, and manage our department's projects and tasks.

Puntos a favor: LiquidPlanner allows our teams to track thousands of tasks across hundreds of projects. Features critical to us include the ability to effectively view hundreds of projects, define sub-folders (ie. summary tasks) more than one level deep, and define filter views (to limit on screen content) are critical features.

Contras: No ability to create private projects and tasks. No ability to create more than one workspace. No ability to assign or limit personnel access per project (only per your single workspace). The very limited functionality of the mobile application make it effectively useless.

Comentarios: Liquid Planner has helped us be more organized and has helped us manage several projects at once. Being able to see expected project completion dates and expected hours to complete is helpful. Overall I am very pleased with Liquid Planner but wish it was better in the areas I mentioned.

Puntos a favor: I like sevaral things about Liquid Planner. Here are just a few. I like the project management in general. I like the range of hours for tasks. This helps improve overall project scheduling. I like being able to add custom fields to tasks and projects. I like the ability to do ASAP Tasks.

Contras: While great, Liquid Planner is not perfect. I wish the reports and analytics worked a bit more intuitively. There are several things that I have tried to do that I have not been able to figure out. Some I have been able to resolve with customer support. Others I found were things that are not possible. Although Liquid Planner is set up great for tracking time for projects it doesn't work well for projects that are firm fixed priced. Most of the projects we work on here are firm fixed priced. I am aware of the baseline feature, but frankly it just isn't very good, nor are the graphs for tracking to plan. There are a few other things that I'm not remembering at the moment.

Comentarios: I do like the tool. It's fairly simple to learn. Menu structure and feature overload are intimidating at first, but you get over that (to an extent). iOS app is important to my team - quick reference to projects running is very good to have and many other products like LP don't have a mobile app at all. Overall, it's just not for me and my team. If there are better connections with development tools (Jira, BitBucket, Slack etc.) in the future, we may reconsider.

Puntos a favor: It's easy to set up hierarchy and control a project using LiquidPlanner. Feature set is very good and there are few gaps. For project planners, it's a great tool because it allows you to assign tasks, add time, and see a Gantt chart in a few clicks.

Contras: It's not for me. I'm in Product Management and my team was looking for a tool that will integrate with (or be less friction) with our current development tools. We currently use Atlassian (Jira, BitBucket) products for development and Google Sheets for our sprint management. The cons of LiquidPlanner is that it's a PROJECT tool, not a Product tool. I know LP probably doesn't plan on filling that need for a Product tool but there is a gap in that market and providing integrations with products like Atlassian could allow for LP to expand into a completely new market. All the features are there, just need to engineer some more automated and simplified ways of managing products, rather than large scale projects with LP.