Likelihood to Recommend LiquidPlanner is amazing for any time of project management scenario where you have to manage several teams and details. Running a project through LiquidPlanner is so easy because it lets you break down the project into sections and folders and small tasks that you can assign to specific people. With a small to medium size team-- LiquidPlanner is amazing for organizing and tracking details. If you have a huge team or not a ton of details to track LiquidPlanner might not be right for you because it is a software that requires some good training to learn and has tons of functions that can be utilized so it seems better suited to be used by a smaller group looking to coordinate or for people who have lots of details that can be difficult to track.
Read full review If you have a need for tracking projects and keeping the teams on the same page with the status and updates within a project, Planview AdaptiveWork works well. I do like how discussion posts automatically go to folks email addresses and every note is stored within the project. I also like the flexibility of reporting and configurations that can be made. Depending on how you use the system and what your needs are, the configurations can sometimes impact each other and it's not automatically known what the impacts will be unless you read through each configuration that has to do with your problem. It would be great if the configurations were more user-friendly instead of easy for people with configurations backgrounds. It's not always apparent which formula you should use for what you need - and the formula options require some training or some experience in coding to understand immediately. If the configurations could be "dumbed down" a bit and then warnings for impacts to other configurations before being saved, that would be helpful.
Read full review Pros Priority based planning. Every other planning software we've used relies on dates and therefore needs constant attention. Priority based planning means that the plan is always up to date. Ease of use. LiquidPlanner has a very short learning curve. This is critical to getting team members to use it. Forecasting. LiquidPlanner makes it very easy to run scenarios by simply dragging and dropping projects and reassigning resources. Awesome Support. I get personal responses very fast. Usually within a couple hours. And, they listen and ask for more information. Read full review Highly customizable, can develop organization specific workflows, modules, etc. Interface (in most instances) is easy to use. Timesheets, project details, and report modules are fairly easy to navigate and understand. Good comms tools like discussions, group pages, automatic reminders and notifications. Read full review Cons The interface is messy and cluttered. The best way to find things and see what you actually want to see is the main Projects view which is also the most cluttered and hardest to maneuver in. Clicking an external link someone posted in a comment or task description doesn't open in a new window by default, so we are constantly having to go back to get to LiquidPlanner again. The way that the interface saves your state globally (rather than per tab instance) means that if you click a link from someone else to a task that's not yours, then it adjusts your filters on the Projects page. Then if you refresh another LiquidPlanner window where you were on the Projects tab, suddenly all of its filters are updated and what you were looking at may no longer be there. It might just be the way that we use the system, but the Home and My Work tabs are fairly useless for us. They typically don't show the tasks we're actually looking for. Read full review Planview AdaptiveWork's ability to create relations between work estimates, resources, and time is one of its strengths but also one of its drawbacks. The average user is a little less considerate of the way these things interact with each and the automatic way in which Planview AdaptiveWork will affect one or the other can occasionally create a confusing scenario if the user is unaware of how changing one will affect the other Read full review Likelihood to Renew We may not renew LiquidPlanner's contract, but only because my company has recently been acquired and we'll be adopting some of the software that they're using to standardize process. LiquidPlanner's development team releases new features pretty often, so it seems like the gaps and inefficiencies are slowly getting smaller/less frequent
Read full review I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.
Read full review Usability Easy to learn and utilize. Can export charts and reports for sharing with colleagues.
Read full review It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented. The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.
Shel Hankley Information Systems Analyst, IT Project Manager and Clarizen Administrator
Read full review Performance Reports: Quick to Reasonable Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable (By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.) Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow
Read full review Support Rating They have been great in trying to come up with creative solutions to help us do what we want to do with the platform. I would say their support has been exceptional because we have hit them with some complex requests.
Read full review Read full review In-Person Training • We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period. • Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here
Read full review Online Training Our trainer, Alex, is exceptional and knows the product really well. I swear he must have wrote the product himself! His manner with training is very easy going, gives you homework that is applicable to what you need to learn and stages it correctly for you. It was a pleasure to be trained by him.
Read full review Implementation Rating I performed the implementation with our Clarizen provide trainer, who knew the product 100% and it went quickly and without a problem. It was a pleasurable process without the problems other software implementation often encounter. Kudos to the Clarizen team for making this a worry free process for their clients because it is worry free.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Miro is a more versatile tool, but not quite made for planning and organizing. LiquidPlanner is very intuitive, fast to learn and easy to communicate. The added value of prioritizing tasks, personalized boards and gantt charts are really important during the planning and design thinking in the business. LiquidPlanner is simplified yet more helpful.
Read full review Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew
Read full review Return on Investment LiquidPlanner really forces you to map out your workflow. For me, honing into a template that I can later adjust as needed has been huge, as there is less time at the beginning of a project trying to assign and figure out what needs to happen when usually it never changes. Communication between employees, especially ones not immediately available in the office has been very welcomed. It helps having conversations documented in a public, logical place that is easy to find and refer to as the project continues. Our productivity has definitely skyrocketed as we've really gotten a feel and committed to using LiquidPlanner daily. As we move forward, we continually try to add more and more ways for us to use the service. Read full review Time tracking, of course, has a big impact on ROI, as we can see what and how much time is spent on certain projects and clients, therefore better letting us scope and forecast future projects. That said, this is not something that is individual to Clarizen. The same goes for any time tracking software. Read full review ScreenShots LiquidPlanner Screenshots Planview AdaptiveWork Screenshots