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Video Transcript
In this video, we’ll be looking at scheduling and managing multiple projects in LiquidPlanner. For many years, teams have been struggling to apply 100-year-old planning techniques to their projects. The results haven’t been good. They’ve still been late, they’ve all been over budget, and there have been too many mistakes. Fortunately, LiquidPlanner offers a fresh approach that delivers great results. The LiquidPlanner approach is simple, powerful, professional and above all else, realistic. LiquidPlanner focuses on delivering schedules that make sense. We do that by having a set of scheduling assumptions. These assumptions allow us to build a schedule that you can actually trust and an overall planning process that gives you a sense of confidence
The first assumption is that everything is priority-driven. This means that things that are higher in your portfolio are more important and get scheduled first. Things that are lower get scheduled later. We also take a different approach to estimating. All estimates in LiquidPlanner can be ranged estimates. This means that you can get both a best case and a worst case estimate of the effort needed to complete the task. When you do this, you capture the uncertainty associated with your task and it’s the uncertainty that makes our projects go sideways. LiquidPlanner respects people’s availability. We never overload anyone. All scheduling is automatic in LiquidPlanner so your schedule is always current and up-to-date. And finally, we’re big fans of promise dates. Promise dates drive alerting in LiquidPlanner. Set a promise date and if your project becomes at risk, you’ll know about it
So let’s take a look at managing multiple projects in a priority-driven portfolio. I’m in a workspace called Game FX, for a fictitious game developer. There are two projects in the workspace right now: a website project and a brochure project. The brochure project is actually in two phases, we’ll take a look at that. All the tasks are currently assigned to me, so the schedule streams right out because everything is in priority order. My first task, Spec Website, shows up first and my last one, Print Brochure, shows up last. If the brochure project is more important, all I need to do is drag it above the website project to reprioritize. The LiquidPlanner scheduling engine runs, and when you refresh, these two schedules swap: the brochure project comes forward and the website project gets pushed back. Now when you’re running multiple projects and juggling them, you eventually get to the point where you want to start prioritizing tasks specifically to work on one or the other, to switch back and forth, and LiquidPlanner provides an easy way to do this.
I’m going to create a package. Packages are a special feature of LiquidPlanner that allow you to really get in and manage priorities closely. ASAP popped in at the bottom, so I’ll drag it to the top because I definitely want that to be high priority. Now suppose my website project, which is lower priority, has a task in it that I want to get done right away, like Client Design Review. I can take that and I can give it a priority override by dragging it into ASAP. That takes my Client Design Review task, moves it up to the top of the project and puts a breadcrumb over here on the right that says it’s in ASAP. In fact, if I click that, it’ll go up there, it’ll open that up and show me the Client Design Review task is both there and down here in the website project. Let’s take something from the brochure project and move it into ASAP. I’ll go down to Phase One and I definitely want to get that Source Material done really quick, so I’ll put that in there, and I need to spec the brochure, so I’ll put that in there to make sure that that stuff gets done ASAP. And there’s nothing in Phase Two, we’ll leave that at the default priority. Now I can see my schedule has taken a different shape, reflecting my new priorities.
We’ve seen how packages can be used to override priorities and individual tasks, but packages have another trick as well. You can put whole projects into packages as well. This means that you can build a rather sophisticated portfolio structure around your projects. For example, I might build a structure of packages that represents a release process or some kind of delivery vehicle where multiple projects come together. Once I have my structure set up, I can just move the projects into it. One of the advantages of setting up this additional structure is you get additional scheduling rolls-ups. Additionally, every container, every parent node in the LiquidPlanner plan also automatically has reporting created for it. This is a great way to model your basic and core processes. But this doesn’t have to be all structured and fancy. It can be as simple as priority buckets, what’s next, what’s high priority, low priority, and maybe what’s on hold. Another common way to use packages is to set up different packages for months or quarters or any other time-based organization that’s interesting. Let’s go back to the Game FX example and see what that would look like.
I’m back in Game FX. Here’s our original two projects, but a lot more projects have joined the portfolio. I’m going to change my timescale to months so I can get a better birdseye view. I’ve also added some new structure. Here’s two more packages representing 2011 second quarter and 2011 third quarter. I’ve also set some promise dates on these packages at the end of those quarters. What we’re going to do now is distribute projects into those packages, trying to fill them up. So the website and the brochure, they’re active now so they go into Q2. Let’s see if we can fit in two more. And it looks like we’re bumping right up into our deadline. Let’s start working on Q3. I’ll take these first five, they’re going to fit for sure. Super Sliders, that’ll fit. But this Snow Crash, that looks like it might fit in Q2. Gummi Gems look Q3, and in fact, it looks like everything else is going to be Q3 except for maybe support requests, which we’ll fit into Q2. Go Go Guppies can’t hide at the bottom
So now I have a portfolio view that helps me answer two new questions: what can I deliver in the second quarter, and what can I deliver in the third quarter? And I already see two problems: one is with Smash and Grab 2 and the other is with Go Go Guppies. They’re both showing some red.
So that’s a very brief introduction to project packaging in LiquidPlanner. One more great tool to be aware of is clients. Clients are another good way to get multiple projects organized. Whenever you create a project in LiquidPlanner, you have the opportunity to also associate it with a client. If you do this for your projects, you’ll be able to use portfolio mode and see your projects grouped by clients. You’ll also get better reporting because reports are client-aware. And finally, when you use clients, you get additional filtering features. You’re definitely going to want to do filtering when you’re working with large sets of projects. Let’s take one last look at Game FX.
Ok, here we are. You’ll notice the projects all have green breadcrumbs now. These represent the client that the project is for, so Logix Blocks is for Mobile Madness Group. While I’m looking at all the projects in priority order now, I can click the portfolio button and that shows me all the projects by client. This is a handy way to get a birdseye view. I can easily see what’s happening for each client and when things are getting done. Portfolio view is also a great way to navigate. If I click on Game Associates and then click open, I’ll go into the plan filtered for just game associates, so if I expand all, I’ll see just those projects. I’ll reset for now and encourage you to make sure you visit the Help Guide and you can always get there with the Help link. Thanks for watching.
