All Videos » Tracking and Analysis in LiquidPlanner

Video Transcript

Tracking and analysis in LiquidPlanner is about helping your team make better decisions. Once you’ve organized your projects in LiquidPlanner, you’re going to want to start executing on them, and one of the most important things to do is to manage uncertainty, and LiquidPlanner’s tools are designed to help you do this. They’re also designed to help you keep focus on the priority and pace for your team. It’s important to think about tracking if you want to get great project results. In many tools, tracking is a painful add-on, but in LiquidPlanner it’s full integrated and easy to use. It starts with the way we schedule. We always schedule from today and we always schedule remaining work. Something that will help your team stay on track is how we handle the progression of time. As time moves on and it sweeps over your project, your tasks will start to push forward, and if that goes on for too long, things are going to start to turn red. This seems like a simple concept, but it’s overlooked by most scheduling tools. So in LiquidPlanner, if you don’t do any tracking, your schedule will continue to slip and slip and slip. But I promise: tracking is easy.

When you track, your remaining work reduces, and the key is to keep your team focused on the big E which is the expected date. As they work, they log progress, and the remaining work gets smaller and smaller. As I promised, tracking is simple, so let’s take a look.

I’m in the Game FX workspace again. I’m on the My Tasks page and I’m looking at tasks assigned to me. The first thing you might notice is I have a timer running. Timers are an integrated feature to allow you to quickly track time via the timer and apply it to tasks later. I’ll click on my first task, and an edit panel pops open. There’s two sections on this panel: one to allow me to track my progress and the other allows me to update remaining effort, so let’s track a little time. I’m going to stop that timer because I’m done on this task for a while, and I’m going to use that 21 minutes by clicking Use and that pops into the log progress. I’m going to pick an activity, this was marketing, and I’m going to look at that estimate and review it, and I actually got a lot done so I’m going to say there’s about 4 to 8 hours of work left. And I might even put a comment in good progress. And now I might start a timer on my next task suppose tracking at that level is even too much for your team then you can just do the minimal, come here, click, and say done and just mark tasks done that will set the remaining work to zero and hide that task from your schedule but I’ll cancel for now.

Let’s take a look at the timesheet. If you’re a serious time tracker, you’re going to want to use the timesheet. Of course the timers show up on the timesheet as well but the timesheet lets you be a little more rigorous about time tracking. I can see what day time has been tracked to and I can track to multiple activity codes on the same task. I can even put in a timesheet note to comment on just this one timesheet entry. That will flow through to the timesheet export data file. If I’m done for the week, I’ll just submit my timesheet. Let’s go look at tracking on the Projects tab.

That’s nearly as easy. I could right-click and just say mark done or I could edit the item and have the same access to those tracking and estimate fields as I do on my timesheet, but for any task in the plan. Sometimes I work on other people things so I can pick a task and say log progress on the timesheet and that will add that task to my timesheet.

Let’s start taking a look at some of the other views in LiquidPlanner. The upcoming view will show you a digest of tasks that are upcoming within a newer term period. In this case, the next 30 days. The scope of this report is based on the current selection. In this case, 2011, second quarter or if I select just the brochure project I’ll just see what’s coming up in that project in the next 30 days. Every task container in LiquidPlanner has these reports automatically generated and they’re designed to give you quick at-a-glance status. If upcoming looks forward, progress looks the other way. Here I’m looking at tasks that have been done recently, in this case, in the last week. Workload allows me to see who’s working in this area and sometimes what’s more handy is who’s free and available to take tasks. I’ve switched to LiquidPlanner’s own internal workspace to show our three trend charts. The first is the remaining trend and this is the favorite of our developers. They call it their Burndown Chart, and it helps the team focus on getting from a mountain of work down to zero. The next trend chart is my favorite, which shows the estimation trends vs. the actual work done. This helps me see how good our estimation is and when we bite off too much to chew. The last trend chart is the favorite of marketing because it tracks dates. It’s called Date Drift, and it shows you on any given date what the exit dates were on your project. We affectionately like to call this The Slip Report. That’s it for now. To learn about these reports and more, make sure you check out the Help Center. It’s always available in the link, up to the right. Thanks for watching!