Move Over Microsoft Project

I now use Microsoft Project and love your solution. However, if you want users to switch over you need to provide a zero learning curve.

This means keeping the simple nomenclature of Project, e.g.: “tasks” vs “workitems”, etc. Also, keep the Project look as much as possible, Gantt charts, critical path, etc.

Also, you need to provide richer functionality, e.g.: dependencies more than just FS (finish to start), add SS (start-to-start), delays, critical path, etc.etc.

This way one could construct a fairly complex Gantt chart for most projects.

Great start though – love your software.

Ryan

Thanks for the feedback!

We plan on changing some of the terminology in LiquidPlanner in the “not too distant future”. Workitem -> Task is one of the changes we’ll be making.

We attempted to stay as close to familiar project management applications as we could without compromising our basic goal of capturing uncertainty in estimation by supporting estimation in ranges. We have no intention at this time of supporting MS Project’s full (and confusing) selection of dependencies. We find them not particularly useful on most projects, and incredibly hard to use correctly for the average user.

Many of our competitors have essentially implemented “MS Project on the web”. We have no intention of following that path. LiquidPlanner is designed from the ground up to be fundamentally different from MS Project and its imitators. The point of our software is not to produce great Gantt charts but rather to produce great project results.

Please keep the suggestions coming!

I agree with Ryan. I’m a project manager with 25 years’ experience, and while most of the dependencies I use are FS, I have used SS and FF—not often, but sometimes they are the ones that capture what has to happen.

Highlighting the critical path is (you’ll pardon the expression) critical.

Having an MS project import facility would also be a huge help - it’s essential, in fact. Being a Mac user, I use OmniPlan, but I can export that as a .mpx file. I assure you, no matter how great your software is, I am not about to re-type in a plan with 62 base-level tasks, another 23 aggregate or roll-up tasks, and 14 people or resources - and that’s just for a six-month project, which is a short one in my world.

I understand your desire not to implement MS project on the web. If I try to import a file that uses features you don’t support, you can warn me and I can decide if that project management feature is critical to my project.

OK, I found the import feature. I tried to import the .csv file for the project I describe above. Not at all satisfactory, although I do like that you preview the effect of the import before I actually do it. Here’s what needs to be improved:

1. You need to capture the structure of the project (tasks, subtasks, sub-subtasks, etc.). My project goes to 3 levels of indentation (a.b.c.d); you seem to support 1 (a.b). All the structure is essentially thrown away. Plus, once the file is imported, I can’t indent individual tasks or groups of tasks. If you use the ID field in the csv, you can easily get this information.

2. The import can’t parse the people to whom the tasks are assigned. There’s two problems here: (a) parsing the names, and (b) parsing the percentage of their time assigned to the task. You should be able to do (a), even if the people aren’t members of my space (you can highlight their names or something). You also have to do (b).

3. Although I specified a field to map to your effort field (don’t recall its name), the effort for each individual task did not get carried over, so far as I can tell from trying to edit individual items in LP.

@pcashman There are a few places where import could be made a little more friendly, the problem is that there are a really wide number of formats and types of data people attempt to import, at the very least there are a myriad of ways to export data from Project.

If your data was not imported properly, you might try following the instructions we have posted here: http://www.liquidplanner.com/forums/forums/2/to…

• The import code in LiquidPlanner supports nested projects, but may not have picked up which column indicated your structure. Typically Project exports it as WBS, we export it as Order. I personally have a test case that imports data about 200 levels deep. I think we probably identified the wrong field in your file.
• Name mapping is quite good assuming there is one name per row, we will try to map the name in the file against a user’s first name, last name, email, and user name. In our next release (coming shortly, I think I can say that) If the person is not a member of your space, you can have the importer create a Virtual Member as a place holder until you invite them.
• LiquidPlanner supports three different modes for import work, straight estimates, durations with percent complete, and low/high estimates. Assuming these are in a format we recognize it should be imported fine.

Your third point is most likely due to the UI, if you remap a field you currently need to click the “Update Import Settings” button, which will provide a new preview and tell Import to use those settings. It should probably replace the “Import Data” button with “Update Import Settings” if you make any changes. I’ll take a look at clearing that up.

If you don’t mind, I would love to use your import file as a future test case for our import code to make sure we cover all reasonable import formats. Let me know if you’d like me to personally go your file and make sure our application imports it in the future.

I would agree that having access to some of the more advanced features of MS Project would make LP a more powerful, but I would very
careful not to lose ease of use in the process. eProject (now Daptiv) suffered from this issue. They did a great job incorporating a lot of advanced features, but at the end of the day (in my opinion) they created a tool that had a learning curve that scared away a lot of users that were hoping for a simpler version of MS Project.