Recent Posts

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Resource/Capacity Planning

@brad, I noticed you poking a few probable places for a RESTful api. I’ve got some ideas for how to set things up for a decent API, it would be cool to see some opportunities for folks in the community to be able to play with their data programaticaly.

Anyways, I foresee a RESTful api which anyone could consume and a ruby api wrapping that some day. Not sure when, but that’s one of the things I would personally like to get in place at some point. It could be really fun. ...well to people who like to make pretty visualizations of data like me anyways ;)

Topic: feature ideas & requests / users rights

Your English is 100 times better than my Spanish. Thank you for this post. We are currently considering adding access controls.

Just to let you know, if another member does accidentially delete your tasks, you can go to the trash tab and recover them up until the space owner empties the trash. This could be weeks later. You can also select a task or project and go to the history tab to see who has made changes to it. You can not revert changes, but you can usually figure out things like estimate changes pretty quick.

Also note, when you mark a task done, it does not actually go away; it just gets filtered out. You can see it by changing the task filter from “active items” to “all items”.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / users rights

hi guys, nice work are you doing with liquid planner. thanks!

I have an issue related to USER RIGHTS. I have no found in the system a way to determinate what some users can do, and what some others cannot do.

I think it’s very important this feature, because… imagine you work a lot creating a wonderful project plan…. and arrive a new member with no knowledge about the system (or bad intentions)... and delete something.

I’ve made a research these days, searching for a decent system to maintain my work online… and nothing better than you… but, it’s important to mention that, the only company where I remember I found a system with “good” user rights…. was Central Desktop.

Please, if you decide to implement this… I suggest: the option of task/projects/other things, creator ONLY, the account owner, and managers can delete something. *the option of users that ONLY can work, but not create, neither delete NOTHING *the option of READ ONLY (for clients mainly)

the option of maintain PRIVATE some information, but not all…. regarding this… I remember that Basecamp has this option…. you can create a Task List, and add Items (tasks)...so, you can mark as private a task list…. but, although you assign an Item (task) to somebody… the person cannot view the task if the entry list is “Not Private”... and.. this is a bad idea, because perhaps in the same project/task list you have some specific work to assign somebody of another company and you want he only can see this and not other things your team is working to…
So, these my ideas at this time.

Sorry for my english, I’m not a donkey :), I’m a spanish speaker… learning english

Topic: how to... / Printing Reports

We hear you loud and clear. We are starting to work on printing now; my estimate is July for the first rollout. How do you feel about getting everything in PDF format?

We are always hungry for requirements – tell us what you want.

Charles.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Resource/Capacity Planning

When it makes sense for us to do that, most likely. The best way to speed that up is to spread the word about LP.

-Charles.

Topic: how to... / Printing Reports

No reporting is killing me. I’m struggling between making lame JPG screenshots and making lame XPS (browser print) files. Telling everyone to get an account is not an option. Using the XLS export is not an option. I’m stuck.

When will reporting be available?

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Resource/Capacity Planning

Any chance of an API to all this data with a nice Ruby library to consume it with?

B

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Resource/Capacity Planning

We are reallly excited about the analysis and reporting opportunities with LiquidPlanner because we are collecting and saving every estimate and update made to every task and project.

The views on the Analysis tab (http://www.liquidplanner.com/forums/forums/2/to…) are really just scratching the surface in terms of what we will ultimately be able to show.

Our roadmap in this area is essentially to let the community be our guide in terms of what we deliver first, so thank you for these thoughts. Voices on the forums will have a significant influence.

Best,
Charles.

Topic: troubleshooting / Promise date is before Finish date

Traditional project management systems make you put in starts and finishes, not LiquidPlanner. LP is continiously resource leveling and making sure nobody is overloaded. If you set a promise date and the scheduler pushes the task or project close to or beyond that you will get an alert. Also note that the order of the items in the Projects view is the global scheduling priority. If you want something sooner drag it up, later drag it down.

If you have not see the getting started videos, you might want to look there: http://www.liquidplanner.com/forums/forums/1/to…

Thanks for checking out LP.
Charles.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Resource/Capacity Planning

One of the features that MS Project and other similar tool do a poor job at is resource and capacity planning. I’d like to be able to see a visual representation of my booked and committed resources so that I can identify potential times where I can initiate a new project. This feature should allow me to look at resources, by project, across days, weeks, or year(s). @task, the online PM tool, have a great version of this feature in their product.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Move Over Microsoft Project

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.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Requirements...

I would agree that this would be a great feature. Over the last few years, I’ve been using Gatherspace.com as a requirements gathering tool. This tool allows a project manager or business analyst to enter individual requirements and the system automatically assigns each one a number (REQ1, REQ2, etc.). These requirements could then be linked to specific use cases that would allow the PM/BA to have full traceability back to the requirement when they were testing the user cases during quality assurance.

As the head of an 8 person Project Management Office, I’m always looking for one tool that would allow me to manage all aspects of a project in one place – with a straightforward UI. I’d be happy to assist LP further on defining this feature because I believe it will be well received by a large group of your current or future users.

Terry

Topic: troubleshooting / Promise date is before Finish date

I’m on my first hour or so of trying out LP, and I’m getting continual alerts that my Promise dates are before my Finish dates. I see where I can input Promise dates. But I don’t see an opportunity to enter Finish dates. It looks like the Finish date is being calculated based on input somewhere, but I can’t find where to input the Finish date. Thanks!

Topic: faq / How do I schedule vacation time?

We’re working on it. Look for this capability some time in Q3. Glad you’re getting a lot out of the software!

Topic: faq / How do I schedule vacation time?

This would be a helpful one for me. Thanks for the great software!

Topic: general questions & discussion / User subscriptions

Currently there is no option for view only privileges, but we’re working on it. In the meantime, one workaround you might consider is exporting the data into an Excel spreadsheet and sharing that amongst your team.

Something else to consider if budget is a big issue for you: our Charter Customer program. Until May 23 we’re offering deeply discounted rates for launch customers (in advance of our beta exit). Find out more about the offer by contacting sales@liquidplanner.com.

Topic: general questions & discussion / User subscriptions

just looking into the software and have a question about users. If I have five people involved in project management, but have additional users that would be involved in project planning or outside clients that would like to see progress in Gantt form how do they access the info. Do I have to buy a subscription for each person viewing the information? We are not that big of a company so I ‘m trying to balance cost and use.
Any suggestions?

Topic: troubleshooting / Slow page loads

As an additional note, there is a bug in one of the Javascript libraries we use (ExtJS it’s awesome) with the current FireFox 3 Beta, where the date picker goes crazy when setting a “Promise Date” or a “Delay Until”, otherwise it’s great.

We (the illustrious developers) are working on performance with each release, so expect things to get progressively better.

Topic: help topics / Baking in time for support

Hi Brad,

I hear you, we’ve been mulling this one over. Right now dependancies (and delay until) can create slack. We’ve been thinking of flowing work automatically as well as showing slack on the schedule. Having people pull tasks up into the gap was our original idea, but your point is well taken.

I recommend you set it up a bit differently. First don’t use dependancies. Set up your sprints, say S10, S11, and S12 with Delay Until dates set to where you expect them to start, lets say 5/1, 6/1, and 7/1. Set at least one promise date on the sprint as a whole (eg. S10 – promise 5/30). Set additional promise dates on sub-projects (milestones) in the sprint if that makes sense (eg. ITEMS – promise 5/20).

This is how we do it and it works pretty well. If the bar goes red, we know we are overloading the sprint. We can look at the different Analysis reports to access the workload in the sprint. The slack will be clustered at the end of the current sprint (a good place for it to be). If you want people to get an early start on the next sprint, you can relax the delay until on the subsequent sprint by a week or even entirely if you see fit.

The key thing is put those promise dates in and let things flow, that’s when the power of the scheduling engine is at it’s best. Promise dates work best on project containers vs. individual tasks.

Charles.

Topic: troubleshooting / Slow page loads

Firebug does slow down LP. On the upside, LP is really fast with the FF3 Beta. Our Data Center is located in Seattle, WA so latency issues can come into play depending on how far away you are. A good practice for getting the best performance is to group your tasks into containers and use the outline tools to work with smaller parts of the plan at any given time. My favorite trick is to filter down to one container at a time. The quick way to do this is select a container, find the filter label in the tool bar and click the selection link to the right of it.

Topic: troubleshooting / Slow page loads

Hi all,

So far (well, the first half a day) with LP is eye-opening. Many thanks for making this happen. I do have the same question regarding slow load – does Firebug affect indeed performance?

Jae

Topic: help topics / Baking in time for support

I tried a little experiment. We have five sprints schedules. I break a sprint down like this

• ITEMS
• release

In capitals are projects and lowers are tasks. I have made release depend on items and as project manager I am responsible for it. However I have no items scheduled for this sprint and can work on items scheduled for later sprints. Each sprint is modelled identically. However LP generates an unexpected schedule. I now have two weeks before the release task for the current task is scheduled to start as it is blocked on completion of all tasks in items. Two weeks of slack time not scheduled to do anything. However I have plenty to do scheduled for later sprints that have no dependencies. Why doesn’t LP fill the slack time which I have available now with later work?

I understand that the project view is a priority queue. However when a high priority task is blocked on a dependency lower priority tasks should be scheduled in until the higher priority task is unblocked. When the higher priority task becomes unblocked the system needs to reschedule. This should be modeled in the schedule view as the low priority task being worked upon and then stopped and the high priority task being picked up. Once the high priority task is finished the low priority task can be picked up again.

It is just like real time thread scheduling. When a high priority thread is blocked on IO lower priority threads have a chance to run.

Currently LP gives me a very bad expected completion time for my current project modelling because of all the unfilled slack time.

I can solve the problem by moving my later scheduled items into the earlier sprint but that would be conceptually wrong as they are not really required as a delivery in that sprint and if they are not completed then I hold up delivery of that sprint unnecessarily.

Regards

Brad

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Mobile Companion Product coming?

Hi Scott – great to hear. Mobile support is a high priority feature on our backlog, however it is not scheduled for a sprint yet so I don’t have a date. My best estimate is 2nd half of the year. On the upside, you won’t have to pay extra for it. We like to develop incrementally, so we’ll probably start simple and add more as we discover what the community needs in the way of mobile.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Mobile Companion Product coming?

I love liquidplanner. I recently retired my Basecamp account as Liquid Planner is more intuitive and useful.

Big question:
Will there be a mobile product coming that allows me to track/make edits/create new projects, tasks, etc. via, say, Windows Mobile devices?

The app I used with Basecamp was called “Carry the Day” http://www.carrytheday.com which was fairly nice to use.

Any plans to do something similar?

Thanks again,
Scott
scottpet@hotmail.com

Topic: help topics / Baking in time for support

Hi Brad – we’ve given this much thought. Our current thinking is that the best way to handle this is with a technique vs. a feature. We are tryng this out in our own plan right now.

We are experimenting with a “Reserve” sub-container positioned at the bottom of our Sprint (lowest priority). Each person gets 3-5 days of low priority reserve that rolls up into the Sprint container. Each week at our status review, we look at the schedule and decide if the reserve is too much, too little, or just right; we call this “trimming”.

Since the reserve is meant to represent the work we know will be added during the sprint (we learned this from review of past sprints); we should be able to decrement it each week as the new tasks come in. If we can’t decrease the work, then we didn’t allocate enough up front and have a built in alert driver.

Note that in an upcoming release, any task that does not come in by the promise date of the project will get red-flagged; right now only the project does. This means that individuals will get red alerts on their dashboards if their reserve needs attention – we think that’s pretty cool and means the PM does not need to nag people so much.

I like this overall approach because you don’t have to learn a new feature. It also let’s me see with each sprint how we did on our estimation of unknown tasks by using the same tools we use to analyze known tasks and projects. I can also use the comment feature to track the reasons why we increased or decreased the reserve.

Thoughts?

Charles.

p.s. I really appreciate all your feedback Brad. Melinda is looking for people who might be interested in reviewing early designs of upcoming features. If this sounds like something you are interested in, please keep an eye out for that.