LiquidPlanner

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

As a web development agency, I can tell you the one feature that has prevented me from using another product, that is their task estimating feature. Why nobody else does this is beyond me (full disclosure: a lot of things are beyond me) :)

When setting up a task you can actually estimate the time it will take the same way real people estimate tasks, with a time range. Who in the world ever hits their single estimate time targets all the time? NOBODY. With Liquid Planner you enter a range, 3 - 6 hours, 1-2 hours, etc. THAT IS A LIFESAVER FOR US.

Another concept of theirs called "packages" is also brilliant. There you can take tasks and bundle them up into "folders" that make sense to you, so you can look at your projects

Nachteile

The thing that I dislike the most is there are not many integrations with third party time keepers for tasks and billing programs. Harvest would be an example, as would many others. They have their own time tracker, but to use it you ahve to have the app open. Lose internet, forget about it. Working in a car or on the train without internet? Forget about it.

Also, their mobile app is not really of much value.

Vorteile

Having used many project management tools over many years, it's hard to not fall in love with LiquidPlanner. It feels like I've traveled to bizarro world where everything goes right.

I can now put together comprehensive projects faster than I can plan them in my mind. I've never had this experience (including with Excel). Simply put, I don't feel the interface slowing me down. It feels like all "busy work" has been removed.

I never thought I'd have a real-time schedule because of the requirements to maintain it, but LiquidPlanner delivers on this promise. Thank you. I'm embarrassed to say that "what if" scenarios are so easy and fast to do, I've developed stronger intuitive scheduling techniques without understanding exactly why they work. Am I now smarter or dumber?

If you are not the type to love the clock-in/out button on each task, you might be the type to get hooked on adding a few notes when you complete each task because your notes are shared in the team's "blog."

Nachteile

Introducing a new company-wide system is always hard, but you you can use Liquid Planner to replace your project management tools, time-tracking tools and company blog so that should help reduce the total number of systems.

Currently companies that need a fully-featured document library should stick with what they have. There is an API and the company has been aggressively releasing new features so maybe someday.

If you haven't experienced a lot of project management tools, you may not be as passionate about it as I am. Part of it's appeal is that it does what any other project management tool integrated with a company portal can do, but it does it fast and easy enough that it's actually worth using.

Vorteile

Really powerful, the gantt chart overview was really useful while our estimates were kept up to date. Project-focused organization allows us to keep a broad view of a complex project and tagging and export features are able to generate a variety of views of our data in an organized way.

Nachteile

Our executive team and eventually our developers stopped using it. Primary interface of the projects tab was too overwhelming & complex. No way to give teams a link that included the filters down to what they actually care about or give people a link to the exact view & set of filters that I was sharing during screen sharing. Not enough integration with external services (github, perforce, JIRA, bug tracking). Quite expensive. Overwhelming interface meant users didn't update tasks, which meant our data got out of date. Gantt chart stopped being accurate or useful and just got overwhelming. Dashboards could be made for visibility but didn't offer the teams opportunities to modify a limited view. Not easy enough to link to a specific task, or generate a new ticket in the right place with a simple link to a user-speakable identifier like a ticket-based system. Still great for people who are technically minded and want the big picture, not great for people who want a limited view of a subset of the project or are too busy to learn how to use the tool effectively.