In this five-part series, I will be walking you through LiquidPlanner team essentials to prepare your entire team for success with LiquidPlanner. This week we will focus on the key component that sets LiquidPlanner apart from other tools: its predictive insights engine.

What Is Predictive Project Management?

LiquidPlanner is different from other project management tools out there. It is unique because it has an insights engine that allows it to be predictive with your project schedule. Projects are constantly changing, and LiquidPlanner keeps your schedule up-to-date for you by taking information from you to predict and calculate your schedule.

Three Key Factors

With these three factors, LiquidPlanner will be able to create the schedule for you.

1. List your projects and tasks in priority order from top-to-bottom. The higher the item is in your plan, the sooner it gets scheduled. The reverse is also true: the lower the item is in your plan, the later it gets pushed out on your schedule.
   

   

2. Assign an estimated range of effort for each task; this is how long it might you to finish a task in the best and worst case scenarios.
   

   

3. Finally, determine how much availability you have on a given day.
   

   

Start and Finish Dates?

When you’re in the system and entering tasks, you’ll probably be asking this question: How do you enter start and finish dates? The answer is, you don’t.

The insights engine does the hard work and tells you how much you can realistically accomplish with the time and resources you have.

Obviously, priorities are constantly changing, and LiquidPlanner will help you see the effect of those changes. LiquidPlanner will alert you of potentially missed deadlines or over-allocated resources so you can ensure your team is running efficiently. Your tasks are scheduled when you’re actually available, and by accounting for your effort across all projects, LiquidPlanner calculates your start dates to ensure that you’re not getting double-booked.

Don’t miss the rest of this series when we’ll discuss creating and prioritizing tasks in LiquidPlanner.