The LiquidPlanner Blog

I want to tell you about a long-existing LiquidPlanner feature that I’ve only recently come to fully utilize and appreciate:  Following plan items.

Following plan items lets you stay up-to-date on the activity of any package, project or task item that you don’t own, or aren’t otherwise involved in. Setting yourself as a follower will notify you whenever there are new comments, plan changes or decisions made on that particular project.

To follow an item, double-click on your plan item of interest to open the edit pane.

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Is your team afflicted by too much talk, not enough action? Or perhaps your team suffers from paralysis by analysis, and can’t seem to bring their plan into being.

It’s a situation many teams and their leaders get caught in. And the solution is not to hold another meeting. As management guru and forefather, Peter Drucker wrote, “Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization, for one either meets or one works.”

Here’s a project manager’s antidote: Inject a spirit of urgency into your team.

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Have you come across one of our Planimals in LiquidPlanner? Thanks to one of our senior developers, Adam Sanderson, they exist! However, they’re going into hibernation for our next release. To pay tribute, we decided to catch up with the artist to learn about the man behind the Planimals – and why he started creating these lovable creatures.

How did Planimals get started?

One of my coworkers seemed to be having a bad day and I thought I’d slip an Easter egg into our application to amuse him.

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Sometimes, like during this current startup boom, it seems that everywhere you turn there’s an entrepreneur or biz guru pounding out the virtues of being innovative and creative. “Be a divergent thinker!” I heard a speaker recently proclaim. But how do we practice such virtues in daily life?

Well, LiquidPlanner’s Chief Product Officer, Charles Seybold, always has a unique perspective on trends, along with stretching the creative mind and challenging the status quo. So I recently cornered him bought him coffee to hear his perspective on divergent thinking.

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I was recently hired as the consulting project manager lead for a client who was on a tight budget. At project kickoff time he made a peculiar announcement: “No change orders, period.”

The only other time I had ever heard of such a thing was when I was working at a company that no longer exists. The CEO wanted to land a very large project so badly that he announced there would be no change orders on the whole project no matter what. It was a gutsy move and it won him the contract.

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It’s easy to think that “project management” is a new-world job description. Naming convention aside, creative and business professionals have been hammering out great work for a very long time – some with a better knack at juggling products and plans. Here’s a visual stroll down memory lane that highlights 5 great project managers and the mark they left behind.

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There’s an area in the LiquidPlanner offices where it’s super quiet except for the sound of keyboards tapping away. This is where our developers work heads-down writing their magic code to create new LP features and enhance current ones. Kelsey Schlarman sits in this pool of software engineers, and recently took a break to tell us a bit about herself. Read on to learn how she deals with boredom, where she vacations, and more.

Title and description of what you do.

Software Engineer. I help develop, code, and test new features for LiquidPlanner.

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“This is the single most important confluence of technology geeks!” exclaimed one of the GeekWire presenters.

And on that note, the GeekWire Awards got underway.

It was a perfect blue-sky Thursday evening when a sold-out crowd of 800 corralled at Seattle’s EMP Museum to rub elbows, swap biz cards and cheer on this year’s nominees. The evening was an impressive gathering of the top players and companies in a bustling startup community that, if you’re part of, makes you feel kinda proud and tingly.

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I don’t care what Tom Petty says – the wa-a-aiting is not the hardest part. It’s getting started, right? We have a goal and we know all of the pieces that must come together to make it happen. So why the struggle to dive in and get started already?

Psychological shenanigans aside, it’s usually just because we don’t know how to bring all of the pieces together. What are the options? So many choices! Sometimes I see this with new LiquidPlanner customers who are sitting down to build out their first project plan.

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“Kill the status meeting,” some management gurus cry. It sounds good – but is it a reality in today’s business world?

“Few events do more to suck the life and energy out of a team than the boss’s weekly status meeting,” huffs the ever-entertaining leadership consultant Art Petty.

Beyond “draining the lifeblood” from your team, Petty’s Leadership Caffeine blog offers four  reasons to un-status the status meeting in his post, 4 Reasons to Kill Your Weekly Status Meeting:

Time is precious. Don’t waste it.
The pain goes away when you stop meeting.

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