How long will it take your team to complete its next project? Two days? Two months? Somewhere in the middle? Whatever your guess, LiquidPlanner knows what to do with that information. LiquidPlanner ($29 per user per month for up to 50 members) is an online project management workspace that really focuses on (and gets right) the time-management part of project management. Like many other online business tools these days, LiquidPlanner goes above and beyond the old-school project management basics to act as a virtual workspace in which employees can communicate, too. It's not nearly as social as platforms like Jive, Yammer, or Chatter, though, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on what your organization needs to do.
LiquidPlanner is highly specialized. Company representatives have told me that the product is really best suited for small to mid-sized companies of no more than about 200 employees. LiquidPlanner's time-focused features and associated reporting tools are also ideal for organizations that bill by the hour. If none of that sounds like your business, LiquidPlanner might not be what you need. For more general collaboration and communication, I'd point to the workplace platform that's our current Editors' Choice, Podio. For teams that need help specifically with managing workflows and tasks, I'd recommend tooling around with Asana.
How LiquidPlanner Differs
The online-only LiquidPlanner starts out with some project management basics. You can set up projects, clients, events, and the like, and assign them to different team members who have joined your workspace. A dashboard with an intuitive navigation bar shows tabs for Home, Projects, My Work, People, Analytics, Help, and Settings. All these aspects seem fairly ordinary among project-management and work-management systems, but you'll see in a moment where LiquidPlanner veers into new territory.
The Home area provides a summary of how much work you've done so far this week shown as a bar graph by day. That's a little out of the ordinary, but it's in line with how LiquidPlanner emphasizes time and time management within project management.
Once you get rolling with planning and managing a project, LiquidPlanner starts to seem quite different from other tools. Rather than have each team member enter soft dates of completion for tasks, LiquidPlanner has project managers set up schedules based on priority. You (or the appropriate team member) can, for example, estimate the best- and worst-case scenarios for how much time a task or project will take to complete. LiquidPlanner plots out each item on a timeline that dynamically changes as different factors—such as priority and other tasks assigned to the same team member—affect it.
For example, let's say one team member has several tasks assigned to her across three projects, and then one of her projects is suddenly put on hold. All her tasks from the other two projects will dynamically readjust to make use of the time she just earned back from the paused project. Project managers always have the ability to change priorities of tasks and projects, and LiquidPlanner makes that dead simple with drag-and-drop functionality.
There's a lot to take in when you first start working with LiquidPlanner. When I saw a real-life LiquidPlanner account that had been in use for years (this is in addition to my test account), I imagined myself a new employee at the company, feeling intimated by all that data. Could I find my away around? Probably, but only very slowly at first. I would be hesitant to click on anything I didn't understand. It's less a playground and more a well-oiled and intricate machine.
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