All Videos » Building Your First Project
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Video Transcript
In this video, we’re going to be looking at building your first project. Even if you’re joining a workspace that has projects already, this is still good to watch to get the basics. When you build a project, it always starts out with ideas. It’s good to start capturing these as tasks in LiquidPlanner as soon as you start getting more than a few. Eventually, you want to add more structure, so underneath your project, which is represented by a blue folder in LiquidPlanner, you might want to add some subfolders and organize your tasks in them. In LiquidPlanner, the order of your tasks always equals the default priority. This makes it easy to schedule something as soon as you create it.
Now let’s look at that again in an actual workspace. First, I’ll create the project. I’ll give it a name and I’ll save it and now I have a new project at the bottom of my plan. Let’s add a task. I’ll call that task one and I will give it an estimate of 8 to 16 hours. If I want to edit that task, I just double-click it and I can edit it again. Let’s add tasks a little more quickly. Now I’m going to select Add Multiple Items. I just happen to have some items on the clipboard so I’ll paste those in, and now I have six tasks. Let’s add some substructure. I click Add and I say Add Subfolder. There’s one, and we’ll add a second one, and let’s organize our tasks into that. I’ll use multiple selection, holding down the shift key and I’ll take the first three, and I’ll drag those into the subfolder and the other three into the other subfolder and now I’ll right-click Expand Whole Selection and I’ll see all those tasks.
Now notice they’re all estimated and they’ve all been scheduled without me doing anything. This is because they’re in priority order. For instance, if I take my project and I drag it above these other projects I’m working on all the way up to the top of the plan, the system will reschedule and when I refresh, I’ll see all those tasks move forward because they’re at a higher priority. LiquidPlanner has a very ambitious scheduling engine. It will always try to schedule your tasks as soon as possible, based on your priorities. If a high priority task ever gets delayed for any reason, LiquidPlanner will backfill with low priority work. However it will never let anyone be overloaded and when the conditions are right for the high priority work to start, it will interrupt the low priority work to complete the high priority task. If you’re going to be doing scheduling, you should take the time to read the Help Guide section on scheduling and planning, but since the schedule engine starts running right away, you’re going to want to know how to read these bars, so let’s take a quick fly through.
The left side of the bar is the earliest start. This is the soonest you might start on this project. Now remember, in LiquidPlanner, we estimate as a range. Consequently, our finish dates are expressed as a range. There are multiple finish dates. The first one is the left edge of the fuzzy gray bar. This is your best case finish, and it’s not very likely, it’s only about 10% likely. The big E represents the expected finish and that’s your 50/50 case. This is really what you want to manage your team to, you should be trying to hit that. If things go poorly and you hit your worst case, you should still be done by your 90% finish. The end of a LiquidPlanner schedule bar always draws out to the 98% confidence level. That’s two-sigma if you’re a statistics geek. We like to call this the safe promise date. Promise dates are an important part of LiquidPlanner. Promise dates are represented by a black diamond. It’s good practice to set a few promise dates, especially at high levels like on projects. In LiquidPlanner, promise dates drive alerts. If you have a promise date set and your task or project slips, well, you’re going to figure it out real quick. Again, for more help on this, see the Help Guide and watch the scheduling video on multiple projects. Thanks for watching!
