LiquidPlanner

The software is intuitive combining both resource planning and project management, both systems influencing each other, giving accurate predictions based on real time information and updates.

The Gant chart for individual and the overall project portfolio is very basic cannot be exported as a report. When changing priorities the effect of the change cannot be demonstrated against the previous expected finish dates as the previous dates are lost. It would be good if you could mock run a change of the project priority and the system showed the previous finish dates dates against the new dates, demonstrating the effect the priority change has on the project finish.Sending an email on significant project milestones would be a good feature.

The product was simple to use. It was easy to for remote access since it is a SAAS. It did a great job keeping track of project tasks. Each task was simple to enter and simple to manage. Task attachments and checklists were nice features that gave additional information to the person doing the task and the project manager.

The software has a specific mentality about project management. If you follow that mentality, the software is amazing. If you decide you know better, it will lead to lots of lost time in trying to gain metrics from LiquidPlanner. Our team was trained on the former, but decided to do it their own way for about 16 months. It was a long hard battle to get our management team to switch to the LP mentality. When they finally did, the tool just worked with minimal effort and overhead. So, more our issue than LPs, but LP could be more flexible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like the conversation that LP forces around how much time something will take and the idea that building out a list of smaller to-do's will help you identify how much time a task will take to complete. I like LP so much more than a traditional project management tool.

There is a lack of flexibility when looking at projects and tasks together. In Notion, I am much more able to plan out task due dates across multiple projects and tasks that are in-flight at the same time. LP does not have enough flexibility to really meet the needs of a small team working on lots of things at the same time. It is too siloed.