The Ultimate Project Manager Playlist

I am one of those people who needs to have music on all the time. Every day deserves its own soundtrack, right? Maybe you enjoy listening to classical music on your commute to work, or you prefer rocking out to 80s hair metal while finishing up those spreadsheets at your desk. Even the most mundane things can be improved with the right background music. 

That’s why I've come up with the Ultimate Project Manager Playlist. How did these songs make the cut? I had strict criteria for each song: 

• How hard does it rock? The scale went from 1 (“elevator music”) to 11 (“melts faces”). 
• Whether this was demonstrated in the song title or in the content of the lyrics, the song had to have something to do with the project management profession.
• The song is just really fun/hilarious/great to dance to. The work day can already feel much longer than eight hours; what's the harm in listening to a little Jimmy Buffett to spice things up?

Your suggestions on Twitter and Facebook were also a huge help - keep them coming! So without further or do, let's get this party started:

1. Michael Jackson – Working Day and Night

2. Bachman Turner Overdrive - Taking Care of Business

3. Blue Oyster Cult – Deadline

4. Survivor - Eye of the Tiger

5. The Beatles – Help!

6. Billy Joel – She’s Right On Time

7. Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett - It's Five O'Clock Somewhere

8. Puff Daddy – It’s All About the Benjamins

9. Europe – The Final Countdown

10. Blink 182 – All The Small Things

How did I do? Did I miss anything obvious? Leave a comment and let me know!

Customer Tip: Project Creation Workflow Made Easy

We love hearing from our customers and receiving product feedback. It not only allows us to improve our online project management tool, but we also get to learn from our customers. Sometimes THEY'RE the ones teaching us a scheduling trick or two! 

I recently had a call with one of our longtime customers, Matt Nisonger. Matt is with SharedVue, an ever-growing cloud marketing company, and he's definitely earned the title of "LP Guru." Want proof of his LiquidPlanner prowess? Matt formulated his own project creation workflow trick that's so good, we just had to share it.

With SharedVue’s steady influx of projects, Matt needed to find a way to streamline project creation. As he explains it, “we wanted to find a way for our Project Managers to quickly set up projects without having to recreate the wheel each time with regard to scoping out tasks and phases." In short, his goals were to create a template that could: 

• Be used for the planning of all projects;
• Place the responsibility for scoping and task planning on departmental leads;
• Free the project manager from having to track detailed tasks outside of their domain.

Here’s how Matt’s project creation process works: 

1. He's started by creating a general “skeleton” template for his projects:

Note that the milestones are determined by client deadlines, are driven by department work, and the project manager is responsible for making sure each one is met. The grey sub-folders are for functional breakdowns that represent each department that typically works on the project. They are assigned to the departmental heads and will be populated with tasks as soon as they are scoped by the department.

2. When the “Project Approved” milestone is met, the project manager duplicates this template and keeps the new, "live" project low in the priority order until it is fully built out. To initiate the project work, the project manager uses our Email Integration feature to send comments directly to departmental heads requesting that they initiate scoping for the project. 

3. The department heads then create task deliverables within their allocated sub-folder, estimate them, and assign them to their team members. They have one week to scope their portion of the project. This locks down the scoping period, ensures that everyone involved has early input, and helps prevent future feature creep. Once this is complete, the project manager checks off the “Scoping” milestone for each department. 

4. Next, the “Scheduling Signoff” milestone is the kick-off to bring the project up in priority order and start prioritizing project tasks within the monthly package structure they have in place. See below:

The project manager and department heads have a 15 minute huddle each week (with LiquidPlanner up on a projector) to prioritize tasks within packages and discuss status updates and resource allocation.

5. Once each department has executed all tasks within their sub-folders, the PM signs off on all the work by marking the “Signoff” milestones complete. This process allows the project manager to focus primarily on managing the scoping process and tracking against major milestones. They can check on status by simply viewing how many hours have rolled up in the "Total Done" column for each of the the departmental sub- folders.

6. Finally, the last milestone for “Push to Production” is used to mark the date when the product is released and available to the customer.

Although this exact project creation workflow is specific to Matt and his team, you might be able to apply some of his ideas to your own project creation and prioritization needs.

Do you have any tricks you’d like to share with fellow LP customers for more efficient project planning? If so, I’d love to hear them! Feel free to shoot me an email at jen@liquidplanner.com or leave a comment below.

Bug Tracking in LiquidPlanner [Newly Updated]

I get a lot of questions about how to use LiquidPlanner for (or in addition to) bug tracking software.  We have LiquidPlanner customers doing both, depending on the nature of their team, the systems that are already in place, etc. Several customers are using our API to integrate with GitHub, Jira, and Bugzilla. Internally, we use LiquidPlanner and only LiquidPlanner for filing, tracking, collaborating on, and verifying bugs & incidents.

Why? At the end of the day, we want to track bugs along with the rest of our work—in our schedule. Bugs need to be assigned, estimated, and prioritized alongside our project work, based on their severity and impact. We fix bugs (new and existing) in every release of LiquidPlanner, and since LiquidPlanner is the one system we all look at every day, it doesn’t make sense for us to track them in a separate system.

But how, you might ask, does it actually work? Here are the gory details.

First, we have a single place to collect new bugs.  They all get sent to a Package called “UNTRIAGED,” which is the central holding place for new bugs, feature requests, ideas, and tasks until we can process them (Figure 1).  This Package has a relatively high priority position in the "Projects" page of LiquidPlanner, just under our urgent work and active sprint releases.

For us, bugs come to our attention in a variety of ways. They might be reported by a customer via email, found during the testing process or through our normal use of the tool, or sent to us as a system alert.

To get these items into LiquidPlanner, most of us use email integration. This “UNTRIAGED” Package has its own email address, which we’ve all added to our address books. When we mail an issue into LiquidPlanner, we automatically create a new “task” for tracking.

Using the subject line of the email, we can:

• Name the bug (usually it starts with “Bug: XXXXX”)
• Assign the bug to any member of our workspace
• Estimate it in any unit we want (2-4h, .5-1d)

The attached documents and body of the email (including screenshots, repro steps, or error messaging) get saved to the Details page of LiquidPlanner, ensuring that all relevant information stays with the item as it goes through our workflow.

Next, we have twice-weekly meetings to process our “UNTRIAGED” bugs. During those meetings, we review every new item, and assign, estimate, and prioritize it. Some bugs get moved into the current sprint, others get pushed into the staging sprint or out to the backlog. If a new bug is assigned to a developer, they get notified via email and it shows up on their personal tasklist.

We typically structure the work in each release into several major categories, one of which is “Bugs.” This allows us to view, analyze, and report on them as a group, separate from other tasks like new features or tech debt. However, as you can see in Figure 2, the amount of work associated with bugs is non-trivial – hence our interest in tracking them in conjunction with our other project work!

All comments, collaboration, updates, and files associated with the bugs are stored on the Details Page. This includes references to specific customers who may have been affected.  Sometimes this information can pile up, but since the most recent comments, documents, and links are added to the top of the list, it’s pretty easy to stay on top of the latest happenings for each item. We also have LiquidPlanner integrated with our source control system, so that applicable references/commit notifications are automatically added as comments to the bug.

Finally, once the bug has been fixed, we assign it back to the creator (or a tester) for verification. By simply switching ownership of the task, we can move it through an informal workflow that doesn’t bog us down in process. (The person who created the item is also notified by email that they have a new assignment.) Once the fix has been verified, the item is marked done and becomes part of our (fully searchable) archive for later reference.  Voilà!

We recently added new custom fields that allow us to track our bugs even more effectively. We've created a custom field for "bugs", "feature requests", etc. And, when a new issue comes up, we simply assign the appropriate custom field. This is great for filtering in the plan and for reporting purposes!

Naturally, you can argue that LiquidPlanner lacks some of the features of a dedicated bug management system. I’ll give you that. But what it lacks in dedicated features it makes up for in ease of use, simplicity, and integration into our other processes.

How To Tell LiquidPlanner That You're Going On Holiday

Ah, holiday. Vacation. Time spent not working. No matter how you say it, the concept of getting away from the office and instead, taking tightrope walking classes in Paris, for example, is incredibly exciting. Or maybe your idea of a perfect vacation is to spend 48 hours straight in your living room catching up on Downton Abbey. There’s no judgment here.

However, before you pack up and head off for distant, unknown lands, there’s one thing you need to remember to do: tell LiquidPlanner about your upcoming absence. Why? LiquidPlanner is constantly trying to predict and build the most accurate schedule it can for you and your team.

So if you’re not available to work at some point, LiquidPlanner needs to know so that it doesn’t schedule you for work during those dates. You wouldn’t want LiquidPlanner to think you’re working on those website specs when you’re actually perfecting cannonballs while cliff diving in Fiji, right? To tell LiquidPlanner about your holiday, you’ll need to create an event. Many teams like to do this by creating a package called “Events,” and then having each team member put their own personal events in that same package. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to the Add button at the top of your Projects page. Click “Package.”
2. An edit pane will pop up. Call the package “Events.”
3. After it’s added to your project plan, the Events package may drop to the bottom of your page. For ease of reference, drag and drop that package to the top.

Now on to adding the event itself. You say you’re climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in June? Sounds a little insane, but good for you! To add this event or so called “vacation” (did I mention I think you’re nuts?) to your new Events package:

1. Go back to the Add button and select “Add an Event.”
2. The edit pane will pop up. Rename the event something like “Mt. Kilimanjaro” or “Someone Please Talk Me Out of This.”  
3. Double-check that the event is assigned to you.
4. Enter the calendar dates in which you’ll be gone. This is one of the only times that LiquidPlanner will ask you for hard dates. 
5. Hit save. 

LiquidPlanner will automatically recalculate your project plan, flowing work around your holiday. You’ll know instantly if your little jaunt will cause any project deadlines to become at risk, and you can go put out those fires before the big day comes.

Feeling a little foggy about this process still? Our Support Manager Mary Ellen can give you a visual tour step-by-step in our new training video, “Planning Events": 

And no matter where your travels take you: Bon voyage!

All New LiquidPlanner Online Project Management Training Videos

Last year was a huge year for us, but I’ve got a feeling that 2012 is going to be even bigger. And what better way to kick the year off then with a full set of brand new training videos for you and your team to enjoy?

Start with Part 1 as an introduction to LiquidPlanner, and proceed through to your desired topic (we’ve got everything from “Logging Progress” to “Multi-Project Management” covered). Whatever questions you may have, our Support Manager Mary Ellen will walk you through the steps needed to get your work done in LiquidPlanner. Whether you’re a Workspace Owner, a individual contributor, a 30-day trial-er or a longtime LiquidPlanner user, we can guarantee that you’ll learn at least one new thing from these videos.

Part 1: Introduction to LiquidPlanner

Part 2: Creating Project Plans

Part 3: Date Calculations and Scheduling Tools

Part 4: Multi-Project Management

Part 5: Events

Part 6: Logging Progress

Part 7: Command Menus and View Gallery

Part 8: Filters

Part 9: Recap of Key Concepts

You can watch these videos any time on our website or on the LiquidPlanner YouTube channel (don't forget to subscribe!). What is the next training video we should produce? Give us your thoughts in the comments.