Recent Posts by Adam Sanderson

Topic: general questions & discussion / Still Not Getting It

dddobos: We’re doing performance work every release, so some things should be noticeably faster. Selecting items for instance should be much faster in the next release.

The problem comes down to the amount of data we send back.

In general, I find that filtering your view will help a lot, looking at the entire list of tasks all at once will typically force us to send back a lot of data.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Importing

Good points Steve. I would certainly like to expand the export/import capabilities of LiquidPlanner. The single flat file csv export doesn’t lend itself to a multidimensional dataset like ours, which is why you lose one tree when you export. I think we will probably look into a much more comprehensive strategy for import/export next sprint (it hasn’t been fully planned, but I’m going to try and make that a priority).

As far as reassigning people and such, look for our next release. Jake has done a really amazing job of retooling our application to work with multiple selections, so you’ll be able to reassign people quickly.

Topic: general questions & discussion / Still Not Getting It

Good points Steve. I should be extra clear that the first breakdown was by Folder, and the second breakdown was by Tasklist, so we are actually suggesting the same thing ;)

As to modeling outside services, that’s a very valid point. I think there is still some thought to be done on our part about how to properly model this as you’re correct, an outside vendor is the perfect candidate for autotrack, especially on larger projects.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / sort tasks in project folder

There are a number of good points here.

I think I prefer the idea of sorting your view of the Folder View since they manually established order (MEO as per Ricardo), does not actually have any impact on scheduling. I actually think it could be rather interesting. I personally would want to see the folder view alphabetically most of the time. There are certainly a lot of interesting options for grouping and sorting mechanics.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / sort tasks in project folder

So this is something we have thought about, and argued about quite a bit. What it comes down to is whether there is value in allowing an arbitrary order in the Folder view. Right now, the Folder view is ordered just by the user. Ordering by the priority from the other tree makes a lot of sense for tasks, however it gets a little awkward when you think about where to display the folders themselves, because their priority is a little less defined, or at least not as obvious.

Also, if we ordered by priority, people would probably expect to still be able to drag and drop things, which breaks down when you drag across boundaries from the other tree. Imagine:

• V1
  • Task A
  • Task B
• V2
  • Task C
  • Task D

• Task A
• Task B
• Task C
• Task D

Now imagine being in the Folder view, and dragging A under C, and then D under B. The effect on the other tree gets really weird.

It would probably work if we didn’t allow people to drag and drop in the Folder view. This is no doubt a discussion that will be had many a time in our office ;)

Topic: general questions & discussion / Still Not Getting It

The basic idea is that you want to organize in the Folders, and then prioritize in the Tasklists.

Without knowing exactly how your projects are structured, here is my suggestion:
Model your projects in ‘Project Folders’ and your execution in ‘Prioritized Tasklists’.

For example, lets say you have two projects for two clients:

• Branding for MegaMegaCorp
  • Come up with new ideas
  • Show them to MMC
  • Deliver final product
• Redesign website for TinyTinyShop
  • Meet at coffee shop
  • Show them the new site

Ok, so here are two projects. Now I would suggest organizing the work you want to do in Tasklists. For example lets say that you just want to break your work down by Quarter.

• Q1
  • Come up with new ideas
  • Show them to MMC
• Q2
  • Meet at coffee shop
• Q3
  • Deliver final product
  • Show them the new site

Does that sound feasible?

Topic: general questions & discussion / nightly safari builds and LP

A few folks here at LiquidPlanner are using Google’s Chrome as well (another webkit browser), and it’s really great.

Topic: general questions & discussion / Email to Team

Sounds reasonable, I’ll add your idea to our backlog and we’ll take a look at it at our next sprint planning meeting.

Topic: faq / Can I Color-Code Projects?

That sounds like a great plan. Let me know how LiquidPlanner works out for you.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / time of task creation

You might take a look at the ‘history’ tab for the item, you can see when each person modified an item there. We only show the date on the ‘plan’ tab since there’s limited space, but the ‘history’ tab exists specifically to tell you what happened to an item and when, so you can see who created the item and when. Furthermore, you can see when someone else mucked with your estimate ;)

Topic: faq / Can I Color-Code Projects?

If you categorize your tasks (place them in Project Folders) you will get much the same effect as color coding them. Then you can filter your scheduled view to show you only ‘Home/Family’ tasks for instance.

Although you could use LiquidPlanner for something like this, I get the impression that you’d actually find a GTD tool like LifeBalance more helpful. You might also like David Allen’s GTD methodology.

LiquidPlanner really shines when you have a team of people working together, trying to collaborate on projects. So, I would love to hear your impressions of LiquidPlanner as a personal planner, but I would also suggest you look into some other products that are built specifically for your use case.

Topic: general questions & discussion / Email to Team

We don’t have any special team email feature at the moment, however all of the email addresses for people in your work space are listed on the members tab, so in a pinch, that should help.

What kinds of things are you interested in mailing your team about? We might be able to work some of the common cases into our application.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Need to be able to go back in time

That’s a very good point, we’re going to look more at displaying historical data soon. You might look at that the analysis reports such as “Total Work”, they show a historical view of estimates with logged work.

More information:
Analysis In General
Total Work Report

Topic: general questions & discussion / Assigning more than one owner to a workitem

At the moment that’s true agan.

I’ll tell you a little secret though… If you’re assuming an 8 hour day, you can use add multiple and put in something like 6-8h. We wanted to be as lenient as possible there. So if you have 3 testbed activities you can do:

• Test Phase One, tester1, 4-6h
• Test Phase Two, tester1, 6-8h
• Test Phase Three, tester2, 2-3h

Assuming an eight hour day, that should do the trick for you.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Ability to change definition of "recent"

Recent changes should show you the past 7 days I believe. If you want another means to keep track of changes to your projects, you might watch important projects.

To watch something, go to the collaborate tab and click the star in the upper right hand corner. This will watch the selected item and if it’s a container of some sort, it will also watch all of the items inside it.

You can then subscribe to your change notifications by going into the “subscriptions” section from your dashboard and choosing to have change notifications emailed to you. For your purposes, I think a daily email would probably work well.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Offering Live Chat

We often use telephones ;) Feel free to call support. Otherwise we look over the forums pretty frequently.

Topic: general questions & discussion / Starting dates

What you should do now, is log time to your tasks. If nobody worked on any of the tasks in the project, then it will get pushed out by a day. So people in your team should typically log work to their tasks as they complete them. Additionally, as the project progresses, people can narrow their estimates as they get closer to finishing.

Here’s some more information on logging your time .

Topic: general questions & discussion / Entering Independent Projects

For an official overview, read this .

So in LiquidPlanner, there are two ways you organize your data.

• Project Folders: For categorizing and grouping your tasks
• Prioritized Tasklists: For ordering your tasks

If you create a folder, the tasks in there don’t have any particular schedule ordering. When you place the tasks into tasklists, they get a schedule order.

For example, take 2 projects: “Balloon Company” and “Deathstar Remodel”. Create a folder for each, and put the tasks in there. Then lets say you have 4 stages of work to do, because I’m running out of creativity you could create: Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, and Phase 4 each as a Tasklist.

Dropping those tasks from “Balloon Company” and “Deathstar Remodel” into various tasklists will prioritize them. Alternatively you can assign all of the tasks in “Balloon Company” to a certain tasklist, for instance “Phase 1” (in the details pane, select the project, and then set its tasklist, LiquidPlanner will ask if you want to set all of its children to the new tasklist).

Topic: general questions & discussion / waterfall scheme for import

Hi Michael. Currently, you can only specify one tree to import into. At some point I would like it to be smarter about this, but it’s tricky since a lot of people have repeating folder/tasklist names (for instance 8 folders called bugs).

If your data shares some structure between each tree, you can make use of our cascading updates, for instance if you have a Folder structure that looks like:

• World Domination Plans
  • Build Secret Base
    • Part One
    • Part Two
    • Part Three
  • Henchmen Human Resources
    • Screen Applicants
    • Hire Henchmen

If all of “Build Secret Base” is going to be done in one phase (Tasklist) you can just assign it a tasklist and tell LiquidPlanner to assign all of its children to that tasklist as well.

That being said, if you would like me to take a look at your import file and help you with it one on one, send it to support@liquidplanner.com care of Adam, and I’ll take a look at it.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / A concept for project visualization

They thanks for the neat visualization idea. I really love data analysis and visualization. Have you ever taken a look at Circos ?

Topic: general questions & discussion / Assigning more than one owner to a workitem

LiquidPlanner assumes 8 hour days when it needs to convert from hours explicitly, however it does all of its calculations in days and fractions of days. That means that it shouldn’t matter if one person works 24 hour days (eek!) and someone else works 2 hour days, as long as they estimate estimate the task with their own assumptions about how long a task will take in mind.

Topic: help topics / Deleting a Task

Just select the task, and then under the “actions” menu choose “delete selected item”.
On most computers you can also just hit the delete key to delete it.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Desktop Widget for Mac/Windows

Thanks Ricardo, I just did that ;) Pretty neat.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / UI suggestion

Hi Brad, I’ll try twiddling the spacing there and see what it looks like.

I think hovering over the task names to see the full name sounds like a great idea.

Topic: general questions & discussion / Keeping up with discussions

If you look under the recent changes section on your dashboard you will see all the updates and comments for watched items. Also if you have change notification emails, watched items will be included, so you’ll get an email when someone comments on it or marks it done.