Background

Hayward Tyler is an engineering and manufacturing company in the very competitive and fast paced energy sector, working to grow the engineering services side of their business. The projects they undertake are technically challenging and demanding with very detailed work scopes and shifting resources.

They originally made the move to LiquidPlanner from Microsoft Project, as they had outgrown its functionality and struggled to see the interdependencies between projects. At that time, the prioritization of tasks and ability to assign resources and track time all in one place was a giant step forward for their organization. 

Organizational & Process Challenges

Complex Project Portfolio Management

Managing around 20-25 active projects with only 20 team members, almost everyone works on multiple projects at one time with priorities shifting regularly. Ensuring the right tasks are being worked on at the right time by the right people can be very challenging. 

The recent migration from LiquidPlanner Classic to LiquidPlanner New provided teams with more advanced scheduling limits. At long last there was a better way to manage the parallel path on multiple projects, which is the reality of how Hayward Tyler’s business operates.

Reporting

With the number of active projects teams manage, and with new projects being considered every day, Hayward Tyler needs to have a way to show a time-phased demand for all resources that can be used to determine when new work could be started, and when resources have too much – or too little – work scheduled. Stakeholders and project managers could never get this information from LiquidPlanner Classic. LiquidPlanner New, with its Assignments, Grid views and Time Export, provides a phased forecast of scheduled work which helps them to better understand both past and future utilization of people.

Solution

Migrate from LiquidPlanner Classic to LiquidPlanner New

Hayward Tyler has used LiquidPlanner Classic since 2016 and became interested in the idea of multiple workspaces so that the work could be split up based on a number of characteristics of projects, one of which being the primary team working on them, thus allowing users to focus on just the projects in their purview.

LiquidPlanner New has added assignments so the work on a single task can be broken down in more detail, which Hayward Tyler PM’s love.  They tend to have a number of handoffs within a task, and assignments allow them to better plan, track and schedule them.

The ability to download data for sorting and processing provided by Grid View is another feature that managers love to use often.

Results

Solving New Problems with LiquidPlanner New

• Scheduling limits are more robust than daily limits, allowing LiquidPlanner New to address multiple parallel projects in a way that Classic could not.
• Assignments allow a better breakdown of tasks to see progress and manage handoffs as checklist items are completed.
• Board view is more in line with Agile methodologies.

Smooth Migration Experience

The migration was fantastic. The transition of data from Classic to New was almost seamless.  Hayward Tyler employees logged out of Classic on a Friday and into New on Monday.  There were some minor issues to work through on the first day, but nothing that involved the data.

A LiquidPlanner migration expert helped guide the team through the transition. Migration readiness  consultation  leading up to the actual data migration allowed them to clean up some of the legacy data and add some additional tags to assist in the migration and ensure that everything ended up where it belonged. Questions were answered and issues resolved very quickly both before and after the migration, and feedback is continually monitored.