Today we are congratulating LiquidPlanner’s adviser and board member Barney Harford as he is officially announced as the new CEO of Orbitz.com (press release.)

Barney has been a great member of our team and his connection with the LiquidPlanner product dates all the way back to when he and I (as well as LiquidPlanner’s Bruce Henry) were building the private label business at Expedia in 2002.

In short, we had a planning problem without a solution. We were starting up a new business inside of Expedia with only 6 people total on the team. We had to figure out how to build a nimble and reliable planning/execution system for cranking out fully white-labeled (privately branded) instances of travel websites built on the Expedia travel technology platform. We eventually built “The Planner” in Excel and it allowed us to deliver hundreds of websites and never miss a promise date. The Planner had many drawbacks including not scaling and not being collaborative, yet many of its project management ideas found their way into LiquidPlanner.com.

The ideas that we stumbled on during that experience were:

• It’s about execution stupid!
• Everything changes, deal with it.
• Good visualization of workload and schedule are critical to delivering on time
• Past performance is a good predictor of future performance

These ideas have stood the test of time and I’m thankful to Barney for igniting the seed of innovation that has grown into the product that LP is today.

So best wishes and happy planning Barney!
– Charles