LiquidPlanner Puts Project Management into Social Network

Project management software not only helps guides daily enterprise business from Point A to Point Z, but it also deals with the storage and accessibility of content. This sector often doesn’t get the media visibility it should, so this our topic for today.

What do you get when you combine enterprise project management and social networking? The answer is LiquidPlanner 3.0, where project updates resemble — and are as easy to do as — Facebook updates (pictured).

Sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and all the rest have updated the way people interact personally and in business, and we’re all quite used to their real-time formats by now. So why not design a project management tool that fits right into that genre, one that users can be completely familiar with going in?

“We think our LiquidPlanner is special, because it tackles challenges that a lot of other tools flat-out ignore,” LiquidPlanner VP/Sales and Marketing Liz Pearce told The Station when the new version launched in June. “One of those is how teams manage multiple concurrent projects, something they’re doing all the time. How they manage change is really important for IT organizations and other types of teams.

“The landscape is constantly shifting, so how do you work that into your plans?”

LiquidPlanner’s workspace is like a Facebook page for a project. Users gather comments on specific items or on your plan and attach each discussion to the specific task — just like a personal Facebook news page.

Each item in the plan is like its own wiki page, Pearce said, because everyone on the team can update it. “We have time tracking and email notifications to go with that. You get that side-by-side, so scheduling and collaboration are always linked,” Pearce said.

The 3.0 release features an improved user interface which makes it easier to reprioritize projects and tasks within projects, Pearce said. For example, when projects are reprioritized, timesheet schedules for individual participants are automatically updated.

LiquidPlanner, now four years in the marketplace so it has some loyal customers, also has something it calls “probabilistic scheduling,” which means planning can be administered with a certain amount of confidence — or uncertainty — about whether deadlines can be met.

New social-network-type features built into the software help project managers and team members alike keep up on each other.

“In today’s teams, everybody’s pretty much a project manager, even though maybe one person has that as a title,” Pearce said.

The Station says check it out.