Despite adoption issues, I'm still a believer
February 23, 2016
Despite adoption issues, I'm still a believer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LiquidPlanner
Our organization is still in its infancy regarding adoption of LiquidPlanner. I'm currently acting as the primary evangelist for the product to encourage more people to start using it. As a CPG company, I am attempting to prove out how LiquidPlanner can be employed to facilitate our product development process, for which we have many projects with complicated dependencies running concurrently, with competing (and changing) priorities.
- Ability to dynamically reprioritize work and immediately see the effect on all active projects (for example, if you put a deadline at risk because another project is dropped in and takes precedence).
- Great transparency of entire project portfolio, since by default everything resides in a single workspace. Nobody can hide from missed deadlines; they're there for all to see.
- Product is designed to be collaborative; everyone can easily update the status of their own tasks, capture conversations at a project or task level (reducing email overload), and attach documents from other services such as Box.
- Great online help/support portal with lots of video tutorials and knowledge base articles.
- Our dedicated customer success manager has been more than willing to help us in any way possible to improve our utilization of LiquidPlanner by sharing best practices, reviewing our workspace and making suggestions, etc. If you are willing to invest in LiquidPlanner, they are there to support you every step of the way.
- Security/permissions could be more flexible. Users can be granted access to either the entire project workspace or specific projects. I'd prefer a middle option where you can grant a user access to all current and future projects that reside in a particular "package" (a LiquidPlanner construct for grouping similar tasks or projects).
- LiquidPlanner has some unique scheduling concepts that may be unfamiliar to seasoned project managers who dream about Gantt charts and are MS Project experts. In fact, this is one of the reasons why some individuals at my company have struggled to embrace it. I think that LiquidPlanner could add some modules to their online support site to focus specifically on this type of individual and help to ease the transition to the LiquidPlanner way of thinking.
- Their desktop web application is stellar. However, they've been lagging in updating their mobile app. I don't think that the mobile app needs all of the functionality of the desktop web application (it would make the smartphone app too complicated to use), but the basic UI hasn't evolved along with iOS and could use some sprucing up.
- At the moment, we do not have enough individuals in the organization using LiquidPlanner to have any meaningful impact to ROI, but I still believe that it has great potential. I think once we reach the "tipping point" and start to manage more and more of our projects in it, we will eliminate or reduce much of the chaos and confusion we face currently by having myriad project management tools, templates, and methodologies practiced through the organization (if at all).
We ruled out Microsoft Project because of its complexity, cost, and perception that is is more of a project manager's tool rather than a collaborative solution that anyone could use. We evaluated Clarizen quite rigorously alongside LiquidPlanner, but we selected LiquidPlanner because it appeared to be easier to learn and use. Although Clarizen had more functionality, we found it somewhat more intimidating and complicated. We weren't sure we'd need all that extra functionality anyway.