I just watched the DEMO presentation by the Liquid Planner team. It’s, uh, kinda ridiculous. The software is web based, which means its slow, locks up the browser, and has random features that require you to click to refresh them. Why do people think every app needs to be built on the web? The internet itself is the killer-app enabler, not the world wide web. At my company, we use Salesforce to manage our customer relationships, and the number one complaint is that it is web based and not nearly performant enough. Users can notice delays as little as 100 ms, and when they are trying to ‘interact’ with software that slow, they will get annoyed. Think Windows 3.1 on 25 Mhz PCs.
“The one thing that Liquid Planner does, that no other tool does, is allow you to capture and manage uncertainty.” I was thinking that meant some heuristic based, statistically calculated uncertainty. Actually, it meant that you could put in a range for a time estimate. Thats it. IMO, that isn’t the problem with project management software and Gantt charts. The problem is that nobody wants to update the damn thing, so it never reflects reality. Passive, implicit task tracking is the way to go.
Finally, the thing has so many buttons and features that it’s intimidating. MS Project had the same problem, and we could never get the thing to stop scheduling people at 300%, so most of us used Excel or just plain text to do task management. The complexity of the planner is inversely proportional to the amount of time the actual resources will use it. I guess that is what happens when you get a bunch of PMs from Microsoft, Expedia, and Intel together to build a product. These guys are going to need a lot of luck.
