I have recently had to look at implementing a new project management process into the IT team to cater for an ever increasing demand on our team to deliver projects for various clients. MS Project was in use for certain projects but what was becoming clear was that each member was looking after different projects for different clients. Even if Project was in place for all of these, it was going to be very cumbersome, and would not easily account for our main issue – prioritisation.
Because we have various clients, project requests land at any time – of course these clients do not have any visibility of each others projects so arranging them accordingly becomes a significant task. This is only further complicated by the fact that new and existing projects alter in priority – for us defining and handling this constant shift in workloads was very important.
Having dismissed Project in terms of functionality and cost, I started to investigate some of the online offerings. Having read various reviews and trying some of them out, I eventually came to one that fitted our needs very well.
Liquid Planner ( www.liquidplanner.com ) is an online system that provides some unique project management features. Primarily it requires project work to be estimated rather than exact days or weeks – allowing a gradual scale that shows a much more realistic impression of how and when a project will progress.
As projects are added in you begin to build up a clear picture of what work is being asked for. Now the clever part – imagine one of your clients submits a new request or asks for an existing project to be made the top priority – you simply drag the project up the tree to the top. The system recalculates the new priority item against all the rest and renders an altered plan to show the impact of this change against your whole list. This is fantastic not only to show the client the ramifications of the shift but in assessing the impact to your own team.
Another useful feature we will be using heavily is time tracking – any task in a project allows you to click a timer button. You can then carry on with the task until finished – when the time is stopped you can add a note about work carried out relating to the task for future reference. Your time is then clocked into a timesheet to be used for billing purposes if required.
I am not going to try and describe all the components of Liquid Planner – but if you are small team or even an individual contractor the cost is still accessible – yet it can be used to almost any scale if required. In terms of usability I was able to add projects in and start using it almost immediately which is important for adoption within my team. I would recommend watching some of the videos http://www.liquidplanner.com/videos/ as they are short but show off the functionality very well.
I am looking forward to much more organised 2010!
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