LiquidPlanner Erfahrungen

This software helps our agency thrive and manage a lot of work with ease. We have out entire in house team as well as select contractors set up in this tool for our time tracking and project management of tasks and projects. It offers tons of flexibility and allows us to follow a hybrid waterfall/agile approach to managing work. Schedules are easy to create and export on the fly, reassigning team members and forecasting are easy, etc. It's also very easy to prioritize project work and escalate accordingly and look out and plan months in advance.

Might be a little outdated feeling in that there isn't a Trello-style board to drag and drop projects/tasks/people, though there is a similar functionality still built in to the tool. It's also not really designed to allow external project teams (your clients) into the system, but there are workarounds.

Liquid Planner provides a real-to-life approach to project management. I love the way that they use a 3-point estimate for likely remaining effort for each task. This rolls up into a very useful, and dynamic estimate of project completion.

Though there are work-arounds, it is sometimes frustrating that task dependencies are tedious to enter.

It's most of what we need to manage a project. Having tried a number of other project planners, I don't know of anything else I'd rather use.

- How much time did X number of (selected) tasks take to finish based on the time logged (start/end dates) as an average? Can I revise the estimate on all subsequent tasks based on that estimate automatically?
- Too many lines in the UI. Needs a facelift. I've made a subdued version available here: https://userstyles.org/styles/163485/modern-ui
- I desperately wish you could see more tasks at the same time.
- You should be allowed to select hundreds of tasks at a time (not being limited to 50 would be great)!
- I want to see a visual queue of tasks per employee spanning multiple projects as a timeline wherein each task is denoted as finishing on a specific day.
- Stopwatch needs to always be accessible, and have multiple stopwatches visible per current tasks for the day in one (dockable) panel that persists (doesn't run away).
- Icons are blurry. You need a pixel artist on the team.

Compact, ease of use. Package concept is nice, things can be moved around easily.

More colors need to be available in the data customization, the few that are there are not enough.

Very feature rich, accessibility via web and mobile and analytics reporting are some of the big pros.

It is a bit pricy compared to some of the other options, but the value is there if you are using it regularly.

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.

LiquidPlanner works with a 3P strategy. Thus, this software works to plan, predict, and perform which is impeccable. So, it helps in aligning and managing your business in better ways. The LiquidPlanner has a better scheduling network and works by providing the best features for marketing trends. Additionally, you can also enjoy the free accounts here. LiquidPlanner is a highly productive tool. This software provides you with a helpful guide about the format and structure that you should follow for projects. Additionally, LiquidPlanner properly saves all your files and important documents without consuming much space. Thus, it is the better option to choose for storing significant data in one place. You should use the premium version to unlock other features.

The most unwanted feature of this tool is the complex system. Thus, users find it hard to understand and operate the tool. So, there is a need for qualified skills to use its dashboard and further operations. LiquidPlanner only works for the basic features and doesn't provide any tested list opportunities. Additionally, this software doesn't work with the user-friendly mode and thus, at times users find it hard to manage it.

It's so easy to assign tasks to individuals and groups alike. The level of functionality is as much or as little as you want. We can track ballpark revenue vs expenses at a glance, allocate projects based on existing workload.

It's unfortunate that you can't assign fixed labor costs, or add non-labor expenses to tasks and projects. This could allow for more accurate tracking of total billing vs total expenses at a glance without resorting to using additional software. Being able to generate invoices would also be a great benefit that would negate the need for additional software.

LiquidPlanner is a powerful online tool for managing activities, workloads, and plans. This can automatically and dynamically schedule work for your entire team even when circumstances change.

Setting up projects and learning to use them requires a lot of time.
There is no interactive Gantt chart and no attachments other than images or milestones.

I like 2 things most about this software: 1. The top-down scheduling engine2. The ability to use a "package" to pull tasks from different projects and prioritize them amongst themselves for any given week. This helps our resources who work on multiple small projects understand the priority of the tasks against everything they are working on.

Understanding what pushes a resource load color coding to red. Sometimes it's obvious why a resource is overloaded. Other times, not so much.

LiquidPlanner is easy to use and automates my routines, which saves me time. LiquidPlanner's use of Gantt charts to manage tasks and project progress provides a unique representation of the realities of a project's business, eliminating the need to manually update, recalculating deadlines and completion dates. I was also able to communicate more efficiently and effectively with my team members because I have a list of tasks to complete on a priority basis. Apart from that, it offers task management capabilities to store project documents, tables, and data in one place for all team members, making it easy to have everyone on the same page in terms of conversations and planning, and makes integrations straightforward.

Positives outnumber negatives in LiquidPlanner. It is a low-cost, easy-to-use project management application. The LiquidPlanner user interface is appealing, adaptable, and easy to understand. The notification system is excellent.

LiquidPlanner is a powerful project management tool. It can be used to track tasks, projects, employee capacity, schedules, deliverables, and hours. I find that the most important and helpful feature of LiquidPlanner is its ability to track employee capacity and move estimated completion dates back if someone is overloaded. This is crucial if you are working in an environment with multiple projects going on at the same time who are obliged to share certain resources (2D artists, programmers, video editors, etc.)

At most I can think of only two cons related to LiquidPlanner
1. Setting up a project in LiquidPlanner is definitely time-consuming. Project managers will need to dedicate several hours to transforming their WBS information to something that works in LP. However, this is just a drain on PMs and not project team members.
2. In some environments it can be difficult to get employees to "buy-in" to LiquidPlanner and consistently update their hours and tasks. It's a behavior change and culture shift that must be encouraged and re-enforced regularly.

I like the predictive functionality, ease of commenting with email notifications, and the analytics tab. Makes it easy to allocate department resources and understand at a glance where bottlenecks exist.

I would like to have more custom fields.

I would like a filter that allows me to view all of the projects that I own regardless of who owns the tasks. It’s hard for me to only see *only* the projects that I own because i’m on at least one task within every project of the department so every project shows up.

It would also be great to have the ability to set certain tasks, for example ones with zero expected effort allocated, to be impervious to flames. Those are basically check boxes, reminders. We like having people assigned but we don’t like the fact that they can flame entire projects predictively.

It would be great to have a view on the projects tab or the person tab that is a simple line graph showing expected/past effort/hours logged by day, by month etc: hours on the Y axis and days/months on the X axis.

LiquidPlanner is quite customizable with different ways to view tasks and many different screens to visualize things in alternative contexts. For a project manager on the business side, it allows for very powerful organization of multiple projects and teams, and many possibilities for scheduling and prioritizing tasks. It allows for flexible time tracking using range estimates and a simple time entry view.

It's easy to lose track of how many hours were actually approved for a task if you want to take advantage of the ability to re-estimate things on the fly. It can be slow to load and cumbersome to use. It can be difficult to find things in the overly complex Projects view. Search filters get reset every time you click a task link from someone else that doesn't match your existing filters. It's not always intuitive how to find things using the available search options (for example, unless you put the project name in every task title, searching for the project name doesn't do much good). Time entry takes a lot of clicks with recent updates if you need to add notes to each item. The API is complex to use (though powerful).

The blend of waterfall and agile capabilities, with a solid Kanban. It is an excellent planning solution for large waterfall based projects and equally capable for agile with scrum projects.

For waterfall: It is far easier to use than MS Project or other such solutions that require manual control over dates. The priority based scheduling engine schedules based on priority of the task in the system's hierarchical order. While this is not always the most flexible, they provide numerous ways to control the prioritization with resource splitting, work caps, delayed starts, and dependencies. The time-tracking capabilities are impressive, and it easily integrates time, notes, and work items. The mobile solution is slick and works well.

For agile with scrum: Liquid Planner can be configured with fields to capture stories, acceptance criteria, and other elements related to stories. The kanban boards can be configured with a variety of stages.

While I agree with the priority based scheduling concept, and its implementation, I'd like a bit more flexibility to control my daily task list rather than having to rigidly follow what the schedule dictates I should be doing. Right now, the My Work section allows the user only to see their tasks in order of master schedule priority, which is not always the most logical order in which to work on a specific day. They do permit workarounds with the ASAP prioritization - which works well.

My other suggestions for improvement are:
- more granular control over alerts and feeds
- synchronization with Google/Outlook calendar (right now it requires manual calendar synchronization)
- Better reporting on agile with scrum, kanbans.

LiquidPlanner is a good tool for tracking employee time against tasks and projects. We use this LiquidPlanner for tracking time associated with specific projects and clients.

With any tool, there are some limitations. LiquidPlanner does a decent job of reporting and dashboarding by project. For our organization, reporting and dashboarding by client and/or by month is more important. Unfortunately, there is not a good solution in LiquidPlanner to help us with this. The solutions that exist are clunky and/or partial. LiquidPlanner has the ability to create shared tasks which is a great feature. This allows multiple employees to be on the same task. Unfortunately, schedule timelines and priorities do not calculate well when using shared tasks. It's better for every employee to be on their own task for schedule timelines and priorities to calculate properly.

I like the way we can use this as a project management, time tracking, and a scheduling platform. So many other tools I've used only address one of these vital areas.

The timers on each task are one of my favorite features of Liquid Planner. It makes it so easy to track time and see how accurate estimates really are on a given task or set of tasks. You can easily view progress, see overruns and areas of concern (there's a red fire icon), and put as many details in the actual task as you need. You can link tasks together, create dependencies, and perform other actions to get a realistic view of a project.

Sometimes it is difficult to set up scheduling the way our company needs it to be represented. However Liquid Planner always seems to be putting out new features and their support team is very helpful in trying to help their clients find solutions.

I have lots of projects going on at the same time, all the time. LiquidPlanner is SO helpful in keeping each project straight, and all the folders and projects within each project. I'm never working alone, so being able to see where my teammates are at in their projects helps me gauge where we're at overall. There are so many features about LiquidPlanner that I love and it's incredibly hard to pick just one to talk about!

It has taken our team quite a bit of time to use LiquidPlanner to its more full potential. I know even now, we aren't using it to its full capacity. We have so much going on that we don't have the time to slow down and pick apart the features. It's a lot of trial by error and "I didn't know we could do that with LP!" is said pretty often -- which is a good thing!

This software has completely changed the way we complete projects. It has added clarity and helped us determine where we need to focus to improve the process. Being able to create reports and dashboards to see the information more clearly is very helpful! This software is reliable and accessible anywhere you can log in to the site, which is also very useful for employees who work remotely.

I have very little to say about this software negatively. I would love to see more options for the dashboards to allow even more customization, but there is already a lot available.

Reporting
Task management
Project structuring

Per-seat licensing gets expensive as the team grows or if you use a lot of freelancers.
Some quirks to the interface, could be more intuitive.

share information among all parties.

N/A

The solution is very flexible and, with internal discussion and buy-in, can effectively meet the needs of most organizations.

The solution is built on the idea of priority-based work. Everything is essentially given a top-down rank of importance, with items either moving up or down the stack as needed. The system then adds resource capacity to predict when items will reach completion. We have enough projects, work efforts, tickets, etc. in motion concurrently that managing priority this way is more laborious than I'd like.

Dynamic tool and Manages overall priorities

- When there is a change in a project, everything else changes without notice. I don't know that the dates on my project were moved, why and by whom.
- Multiple Assignment: I would like to have the possibility to decide if the remaining time is cumulative or specific to each one. In other words, if total = 20 hours, 4 assignee's, I would like to have the availability to identify if the Remaining time is per person or will be redistributed to the 4 assignee's.
- Filter by tags is using only "OR" logic... It would be useful to be able to filter also by "AND".
- Limit of 100 lines in Dashboard
- When I create a Favorite View, it would be useful to have the possibility to share it with another person.
-"+" sign should show only when there is something inside the project / Sub Project / Package.

The tool is easy to ease into and doesn't require you to use all the features to use. Once comfortable with the basics, adding additional features into your projects in simple and intuitive.

There isn't a good way to separate business units within one instance of the tool. Either you have to be ok with visibility across business units, or have to maintain multiple accounts along with multiple license costs.

The most basic difference between this software and others is a simple acceptance that task times vary. However, no other tools account for that, which leads to an unseen paradox. If you are estimating a project to be finished by using the average length of each task, then the predicted lead time will always be wrong! LiquidPlanner can be used as part of the Theory of Constraints Critical Chain Project Management process, which I have used to get OTP consistently over 95%.

At this time, Critical Path is not available in the new version but is offered in the Classic version.