Add this one to your web office toolkit – LiquidPlanner is an online, hosted project management tool that lets you access and update projects anywhere you have an internet connection. The service offers you and your team a complete project environment, social networking and collaboration features, and a probabilistic scheduling engine which tells you the probability of completing each task – and ultimately the entire project by a certain date. With everything organized into a centralized dashboard that can be customized for each team member, everyone on your team can stay focused on their tasks and how they relate to the project as a whole.
LiquidPlanner’s three main areas of focus are task management, scheduling, and collaboration, all of which combined help you estimate your timelines and update progress on a project in a way that is customized for you:
- Task Management: LiquidPlanner’s workspace allows you to easily organize and prioritize your tasks. The workspace has two distinct task list views to allow you to view, schedule, and update your work by function or by timeline. Drag-and-drop prioritization lets you change the order of your scheduled tasks as priorities shift. Team members can create folders, subfolders to organize the data at hand so details at any level of a task can be viewed. Global priorities for your entire team or organization can also be managed in this workspace.
- Project Scheduling: LiquidPlanner features a Probabilistic Scheduling engine that uses statistical math, ranged estimates, automatic tracking, and more to create realistic timelines and schedules. Best-and-worst case scenario estimation can help create a more accurate view of timelines. An automatic tracking feature tracks the expected progress on scheduled tasks, so the project schedule stays alive and up-to-date, even when team members don’t update it themselves on a regular basis. A promise date alerting feature will let you know when project or task-level commitments are due.
- Collaboration: The dynamic, shared project environment offered by LiquidPlanner allows for collaboration, no matter what size your team is or where they are located. You can invite as many people to the project workspace as needed, even if they are outside your organization. A wiki-like commenting feature lets everyone keep a record of the dialogue about a task or project. Each item has its own comment page, where everyone in the space can communicate. Documents and links can be uploaded and shared with team members to let everyone communicate efficiently.
Liquid Planner is free during its beta period, which is occurring now. Afterwards, it will remain free for a single users, but teams of two or more will need to pay a monthly subscription fee.