How many times have you watched people argue until they were blue in the face and then somebody introduced actual data into the debate and it’s all over in 5 minutes?  It's funny how the right data can have that magical effect on perception. 

Some people have to learn the hard way…

And by “some people”, I mean me.  

I do much of the user experience design on LP and as such, my work is part of the plan. I estimate and I track my time.  These UX tasks are always at the front of the project life-cycle because we build from the customer experience outward. This work is a "creative process". That’s a fancy way of saying “there is a boatload of uncertainty and I don’t know how frick’in long it will take”.  

But is that true? Maybe I do know how long it will take. I just reviewed my estimation history (i.e. the data) for my UX design work on our current hot project, Access Controls and saw something remarkable: 

Last June, when we first sketched out the project, I estimated my contribution as 40h – 120h (or 1 to 3 weeks of solid effort).  It turns out this was a darn good estimate since the final total was 100h all in.  But what happened between that first estimate and marking the task done?  

Optimistic compression is what happened; it's a trap and here is how it works.  

My first estimate was made just as we were wrapping up the last project; it was a great estimate based on the design work of my last project.  An analogy would be that feeling you might have when you just ended things with your last roommate, girlfriend, company, or ____________. Your mind is very clear on that day (well... if not clear, at least realistic).  

However, the new project sat backlogged for a while (long enough for me to forget the previous project). When I picked it up again and started scratching the surface of the design; it didn’t look too hard.  I got excited about the project and with a little bit of knowledge (as in a little knowledge can be dangerous), I irrationally reduced my estimate. 

The green mountain of logged time in the graph above and the rising estimate lines clearly shows my “recovery process”, as does the history table below.  

It’s a good thing I’m not critical around here

While my task may have been important, it’s a good thing I was not on the critical path. An estimation miss like this can send a project spinning sideways. 

Lucky for us the LiquidPlanner development team does not make these kind of mistakes. Their performance trend on this current sprint is great. Consistent, efficient, focused performance; see for yourself:

Self-management for the win 

When you make project data available to all team members in an honest way, good things happen. You are supporting a project team's desire to be autonomous while not sacrificing accountability. In our case, the LP team doing this work is almost completely self-managed, yet there is huge transparency into the work. If you’re a manager, let that one sink in a for a minute.  Your job will be easier if your project collaboration tools are comprehensive, open, and help people learn from trustworthy data.

I like easy and having a team that is self-managed means I have more time to design new features (like critical path highlighting coming in the next release). Maybe I can even use the extra time to work on improving my estimation; I mean really, the least I could do as manager is learn to keep up with the team.

End Notes

• All the pictures are screenshots from the real LiquidPlanner workspace we use to manage our work. The red text and arrows on the charts were added for illustration only. 
• You've probably not seen three lines for estimates before (low, high, expected). LiquidPlanner captures and manages uncertainty with ranged estimates and presents schedule data in unique ways; read more about our online project scheduling software.  If you really want to geek out, go read about the cone of uncertainty.

Jason Carlson visiting SpaceX corporation.Yesterday, our CTO Jason Carlson and I were lucky enough to be able to visit one of our favorite customers, SpaceX Corporation, at their headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. SpaceX is one of our biggest installations, and the purpose of the visit was to hear and see first-hand what using LiquidPlanner is like for larger teams.

We didn’t go down looking for pats on the back; we wanted to hear about pain points, feature requests, areas of confusion, and challenges to adoption. We got, them, too. The SpaceX team’s projects are hugely complex (they’re building rockets, after all), comprised of nearly 6,000 tasks. On top of it, they’ve got nearly 2,500 dependencies in the system. This creates some slowness in load times (many of which are browser-based rendering issues). It also calls for easier batch updates (or in-line editing), better dependency debugging, more permission controls, and an easier way of keeping the workspace “clean.”

You can be sure that Jason and I took copious notes. Naturally, these feature requests were mostly ones we’ve already documented and plan to work on as quickly as possible. Not just for the SpaceX team, but for the hundreds of companies like them that would benefit from such improvements. As part of our iterative design process, this is par for the course. Build, correct, improve, repeat. We’re excited to get started.

Thanks to the SpaceX team for taking the time out of their busy schedules to spend the day with us. (As a bonus, we did get a tour of their amazing facility and got to see some of their launch vehicles in various stages of production. Probably one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my life.)

The interior of Kenny's cab.And here’s where Kenny comes in. The very kind receptionist at SpaceX called us a cab to get us back to LAX for the trip home. The cab that picked us up was like none I’ve ever been in before. The interior walls were covered completely with photos of Kenny the driver’s “regulars” – thousands of them. Kenny called the people in the pictures his “children.” The cab was hung with tiny sparkling lights and little inspirational sayings. The back of the front driver and passenger seats were hung with laminated copies of press coverage Kenny’s received. Apparently, he’s somewhat of a legend in Southern California.

One of the sayings posted in Kenny’s cab struck me: “I’m not just a cab driver, I’m a friend who wants to make sure you get home safely.” Really, what more can you ask for in a service provider?

Although we don’t post it on our website, the team at LiquidPlanner operates under the same philosophy. (“We’re not just software developers, we’re friends who want to help you manage your projects successfully.”) I know that sounds silly, but I can remember almost every customer I’ve worked with – what company they work for, where it’s based, and what challenges they face. The reason we do what we do is not that project management software itself is so mind-blowingly exciting. It’s that there are real teams, real people, that need a tool to make their lives better. They’re our “regulars.” They’re the motivation for every line of code we write.

So we may not have achieved the legendary status of Kenny the Cab Driver (yet!), but if we can help our regulars the way he does his, we will have done our jobs.

But one day you grow up and realize running a successful business means making the most out of your team’s precious work hours.  

This is the true story of such an awakening for our team and our big switch to Squarespace, a "Software as a Service" provider that enables you to design, build, and host a website...

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...

Of course we take advantage of some internal systems (like for source control) and use some installed applications (like MS Office and Quickbooks), but by and large we are very dependent on online software. And by and large we’ve been very happy with the service, performance, price, and feature set of these tools.

So if you’re looking to start a business (or just thinking about converting over to more web-based software), we recommend you check out some of the following.

Operations...

One of the qualities that makes Apple somewhat unique in the technology landscape is that they’re not very keen on vaporware. I can’t remember the last time Apple announced a new product without committing to a rock solid delivery date. When introducing the first generation iPhone a few years ago, consumers could pre-order the phone the day it was announced and could expect delivery the same day the product became available on store shelves.

Delivering projects on time with LiquidPlanner? There’s an app for that.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere. – Peter Robert Fleming

The Beginning

It was the beginning of the summer and I was sitting with Charles Seybold and Jason Carlson of LiquidPlanner to discuss the possibility of building a mobile application to support their SaaS project management system. It was fun to be working with Charles and Jason again — we’d worked together at Expedia while they were incubating the ideas that would lead them to leave Expedia and create LiquidPlanner.

From the beginning, the passion for the product and the details came through and we quickly sketched out and talked through an initial design for the application and the API (currently in beta) that would sit behind it to provide access to LiquidPlanner.  The team had a solid vision for what they wanted the app to do both in the initial incarnation as well as over time. Following the principles that launched LiquidPlanner, we focused on the functionality to deliver in version 1.0.

I headed back to the luxurious offices of Deep Focus Technologies, to work on turning the white board sketch into an initial set of wireframes so we had something more concrete to visualize.  More discussion, refinement, and a schedule in LiquidPlanner and we were ready…

The project got the green light and I began work in earnest.  Back at LiquidPlanner, Brett had a super-early release of the API — we were almost ready to begin hooking things up...

We really appreciate all the positive feedback, tweets, and dialog with the user community since it helps us learn how to build even better project management software.

In the spirit of appreciation, we offer our December software update (a.k.a. "Sprint 22"). It's a virtual holiday gift basket full of new features straight from the customer wish list.  

For team members: a new calendar view

And that's just for starters, there's more...

• The team is cruising along with very few issues or roadblocks.
• The client is regularly in touch through meetings and other communication, and happy with progress so far
• The budget, scope and schedule are all in check, things could not be going more smoothly, and then...

Flu season hits! One team member is out sick for several days, another ...

This was an interesting challenge mainly because of the “1-click” expectations we all have around timers. 

The time trackers of this world want just 1-click to start, stop, re-start, switch, use, or find the target task; I don't blame them because time is money. One customer told us that timer use improved their client billing efforts by 15%. Specifically, they were able to bill their clients for 15% more time; these were hours that they had been previously eating.  

In short, everyone wants timers to be fast, easy, and always right.

Edit Task Details:

The first thing we had to do was create a recognizable, consistent, and small timer control UI that we could use in all the places where LP users interact...