LP: How has LP affected the culture of your team?
KC: LiquidPlanner has helped our teams realize what they are here to achieve. With our old tool, only the project manager had a view into the whole picture; the rest of the team had no idea where they landed within the task and could only see their own tasks. With LiquidPlanner, everyone can see the progress and overall, it helps with team morale because everyone has insight into the entire project timeline.
LP: How do you get new team members using LP?
KC: All new users receive a quick introductory course and have access to our sandbox area so they can get better acquainted with the tool. Then, team managers sit down with new users and team managers and go through specific examples that they’ve worked on themselves. Everyone is educated in the same way and uses the tool similarly. We do this so everyone uses the tool consistently and knows how the tool works so they will fully adopt it. Basically, initiation is done through mentoring. This process works for us.
LP: How do you use our support services?
KC: In the early days, we chatted with support very often – even before purchasing. We needed to make sure LiquidPlanner was the right fit for our team and the support and sales teams always had helpful advice on how to roll out LP within the company and how to get proper buy-off.
Nowadays, if anyone has any questions, I direct them to the support page, and if the answer isn’t there, I encourage them to contact the support team. The training videos are also a great resource. We have all of our new users get familiar with LP via the videos because they are so helpful. Support is half the reason why we chose to use LP. We don’t use support nearly as often as we did when we were first starting out.
LP: Version 3.0 [the LP version Micro Nav first started using] vs. 4.3 [our June 2013 release]– what’s changed?
KC: All of the new features have been great. Specifically, your new baselines feature helps us move toward the reporting we need in a more standard format. There is less wrangling data outside of LiquidPlanner, which saves a good deal of time and effort.
Checklists have also helped us move things out of SharePoint and into the LiquidPlanner interface. We have custom lists and logs that live in SharePoint that we can now add to certain tasks. For example, statements of work were logged in in SharePoint and now each item is added as a checklist item in LP.
I also love that LiquidPlanner has maintained stability. It has gotten more attractive without hindering the ease of use. It’s all about getting that balance right. You’ve walked that line extremely well.
LP: How has LiquidPlanner surprised you?
KC: I didn’t expect the updates to be so frequent. It’s been a pleasant surprise. I’m also surprised by how low maintenance LiquidPlanner is. It does exactly what it says – It just works.
LP: How has LiquidPlanner changed your job?
KC: I spend a lot less time making sure all of the data I go through is correct. With our other tool, I didn’t have confidence that the numbers in front of me were accurate. With LiquidPlanner, I don’t have to go through every report because now I have confidence in the numbers that LP gives me.
LP also gives me more time to look at the big picture – what’s on time, what’s not, etc. LiquidPlanner saves me about one-half to one day a week where I can work on other things.
LP: Any parting thoughts?
KC: Just keep doing what you’re doing!