Have you ever worked on a project that doesn’t have at least one unexpected surprise that pops up along the way? One of the big differentiators we’re proud of at LiquidPlanner is how effectively our project management tool captures uncertainty. This is one of the biggest factors that affect delivering a project on time and within budget.  Being able to manage and respond proactively to risk before it is too late is such an important part of project management and successful deliveries. And yet, teams all over the world are caught up in project schedules that don’t accurately reflect the extra twists and turns along the way. 

Did you know that only 16% of people say that they always hit their deadlines?

“Uncertainty” in projects comes in all forms:

• The brief you thought would take two hours to write turns out to be more complicated than expected:
• There’s a delay on materials
• Resources get pulled for another priority project
• The client has new feature requests
• Another priority replaces your existing projects

Uncaptured uncertainty results in a chaotic process, increased stress, plummeting trust, missed deadlines, overspent budgets, delays in production, fines, loss of business, and even lost customers. When project leaders can capture and visualize uncertainty in their schedules from the very beginning, they are empowered by data to set realistic deadlines and avoid these all too common headaches.

Capturing uncertainty in LiquidPlanner

Projects are like the weather, constantly changing and full of uncertainty and risk. From the conception of the company, co-founders Jason Carlson and Charles Seybold were determined to build a portfolio and project management tool that solves this problem to ultimately bring project managers confidence in their schedules. They built a groundbreaking predictive scheduling engine based on ranged estimates to generate best case/worst case scenarios to model when tasks and projects can realistically start and finish.

What’s the scheduling engine?  For every assignment you create, you enter a best case and worst case estimate of effort for how long it will take to complete. This can be two to four hours; two to four days, weeks, months, you name it. LiquidPlanner’s scheduling engine rolls those estimates up into schedule bars that reveal probability of a completion date with 90% confidence. We give you confidence ranges that show you both your best case earliest finish and your worst case latest finish for all the work in your portfolio, from the task to program level. Managing uncertainty through ranged estimation and probabilistic scheduling is the foundation of our Planning Intelligence Methodology.

Hear it from the source! Listen to LiquidPlanner CTO and co-founder Jason Carlson talk about uncertainty and LiquidPlanner in this short snappy video.

This video is the seventh blog in a 9-part video series featuring LiquidPlanner co-founder Jason Carlson. These short clips tell the story of everything from creating LiquidPlanner to how the LiquidPlanner scheduling engine works, and share Jason’s insider expertise on creating the only resource-driven and predictive scheduling engine on the market.

If you’d like to learn more about Dynamic Project Management and Managing Project Uncertainty,  download our eBook.

 Tatyana Sussex coaches entrepreneurs and professionals who are launching a business or reinventing their careers–in short, she guides people through the process of creating something new. She specializes in messaging coaching for entrepreneurs who want to develop their brand, voice and professional presence, get their story into the world and connect with the right people.