Blog - Online project management software: collaborate, schedule, track

Entries from January 1, 2009 - February 1, 2009

Friday

Jan302009

Eat your own documentation

Friday, January 30, 2009 at 2:21PM |

The LiquidPlanner team is nearing the end of a big development effort and we’re at that point where we need to clean up the user documentation so it is consistent with all the changes we made. To be honest, we’re design junkies and completely ignore the documentation until a few weeks before we ship.

Bruce Henry and I do most of the design and program management work for new features and this is really fun, energetic work. By this I mean, we have raging design battles, debates, and stalemates. Sometimes we end up just staring at each other with that contempt you reserve for complete idiots… and then, we do it all over the next day. Like I said, that’s the fun part.

We also share a principle which is “eat your own dog food”. It means we use LP to manage our work, but we also try to follow the same advice and guidance we give our customers. Ergo, we try to do what our documentation says to do. When that’s hard to live by, we realize we have a new design problem to solve.

So in true dog food style, Bruce is now re-scripting and re-shooting all the training videos and I’m responsible for updating all the user documentation and old forum posts. We eat what we make. Its labor intensive work and listening to Bruce swear like a sailor when he flubs a take is its own special fun. But in the end, we get a good look from our customer’s vantage point. It’s good project closure.

Moral of the story: if you are a manager and think working on product documentation is not worth your attention, then you might be missing a great opportunity to check your blind spots for missed opportunity.

Go Barney, Go!

Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 1:30AM |

Charles Seybold

Today we are congratulating LiquidPlanner’s adviser and board member Barney Harford as he is officially announced as the new CEO of Orbitz.com (press release.)

Barney has been a great member of our team and his connection with the LiquidPlanner product dates all the way back to when he and I (as well as LiquidPlanner’s Bruce Henry) were building the private label business at Expedia in 2002.

In short, we had a planning problem without a solution. We were starting up a new business inside of Expedia with only 6 people total on the team. We had to figure out how to build a nimble and reliable planning/execution system for cranking out fully white-labeled (privately branded) instances of travel websites built on the Expedia travel technology platform. We eventually built “The Planner” in Excel and it allowed us to deliver hundreds of websites and never miss a promise date. The Planner had many drawbacks including not scaling and not being collaborative, yet many of its project management ideas found their way into LiquidPlanner.com.

The ideas that we stumbled on during that experience were:

It’s about execution stupid!

Everything changes, deal with it.

Good visualization of workload and schedule are critical to delivering on time

Past performance is a good predictor of future performance

These ideas have stood the test of time and I’m thankful to Barney for igniting the seed of innovation that has grown into the product that LP is today.

So best wishes and happy planning Barney!
- Charles.

Project Uncertainty is not Risk Buffer

Monday, January 5, 2009 at 4:41PM |

Charles Seybold

I've heard from time to time people saying that LiquidPlanner "automatically buffers" their tasks. It is easy to see how you could think this. After all, when you put a bunch of uncertain tasks into LiquidPlanner the schedule comes out looking longer than it would using a more primitive scheduling system. however the added time represents real increases to the likely schedule, not added buffer.

To see this let's take a look at a sample schedule with two people, each of them working on a 2-4 day task.

You can see that Project Baby Bear's end dates extend past the end dates for the individual tasks. So, isn't this project buffer? Well, not exactly. While it could be considered buffer for the uncertainty in the individual tasks, it is not what most project managers would consider risk buffer. That is, it does not account for all the things in Project Baby Bear that could possible change or go wrong. It merely takes into account the two tasks (Anne's Task and Bruce's Task) and the uncertainty expressed in them.

Suppose one of the risks in the project is that either Anne or Bruce gets sick (a not unreasonable project risk). The uncertainty in the size of the tasks does not take this risk into account. Instead, an additional risk buffer should be put in place to account for this risk.

Let's suppose that we think that the longest that either Bruce or Anne might be out sick would be one week. LiquidPlanner is predicting a 90% confident end date on Thursday 1/15. So I would place the promise date for Project Baby Bear after 1/22. Let's make it Friday 1/23.

I double click the project to edit it and set the promise date to 1/23 on the scheduling tab. Now when I click save and the schedule updates (remember that you can continue to work while the schedule is being updated) I see that the promise date icon appears a week after the predicted end of Project Baby Bear.

Alternatively, I could build into the schedule a specific task called something descriptive like "risk buffer" and use dependencies to make it follow all of the tasks in the project. But that would be hard to maintain and really kind of overkill.