LiquidPlanner: Interview with Jason Carlson
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You really have to check this out: LiquidPlanner.com. If there is a playground for project management software, this is the cool kid to hang out with. It is Web 2.0, it is cool, it is innovative and it is just what our profession is looking for. Look at their site to see what I am raving about.
I had the opportunity to have a small chat with Jason Carlson, the co-founder and VP of Engineering of LiquidPlanner.
What tools did you use yourself when you were Project Managers?
“Charles and I spent a few years at Microsoft and nearly 10 years at Expedia. The development team at Expedia was running nearly 400 projects a year with several hundred very smart, technical employees. We tried using Microsoft Project and creating extremely advanced Excel spreadsheets to manage our work. However, we found that these solutions failed us and our planning processes weren’t working. It certainly wasn’t the staff, as they went above and beyond the call of duty to build Expedia. We believe that the tools on the market set unrealistic project expectations that lead to project failure.”
Which experiences did inspire you to the concepts behind Liquid Planner?
“A few years ago we sent 80 of the top Expedia managers and employees through a software estimation training class led by software guru and author Steve McConnell. (Rapid Development, Code Complete, Software Estimation) What we learned from that training, was that our estimation practices were fundamentally broken and that ranges, versus single point estimates was key. This resonated within Expedia, but when we looked around for a tool to support estimation in ranges, we found it didn’t exist. This planted the seed for us to go off and design an application that actually dealt with uncertainty head-on.”
What makes LiquidPlanner unique in your opinion?
“We believe there are three transformative aspects to LiquidPlanner. First, we capture and manage uncertainty. Our probabilistic scheduling engine captures estimates in ranges and does the correct statistical rollups. By exposing this 3rd axis of information (uncertainty), you can manage it. The uncertainty was always there, you just couldn’t see it in traditional tools. Second, teams are collaborative and traditional tools don’t deal with the social aspects of project management. LiquidPlanner captures this social interaction in a rich, project environment. Third, we provide a data warehouse and one source of truth. All of your project collateral and history is managed in one location. We can use this data to help teams succeed on future projects. (as opposed to throwing away a Project file once the project is complete)”
What makes Social Project management “social”?
“Project management has changed a lot over the years. The critical path method was developed in the 1950’s and Microsoft Project and similar tools have taken this paper-based method of project planning and translated it to the computer. However, teams today are different from the 1950’s; there are remote workers, short cycle times and agile methodologies, project-centric organizations, they are highly collaborative and social. It’s imperative that our tools acknowledge and capture that team narrative.”
Do you use your own tool? Can you provide examples?
“Absolutely! We’ve been developing LiquidPlanner for about a year now, and we started using it as soon as we had the basic functionality in place. So we’ve been solely relying on LiquidPlanner to build LiquidPlanner for about 9 months now. We have something like 2000 workitems in the system and we’ve found it to be an invaluable resource. We use a scrum methodology for our software development, and LiquidPlanner has allowed us to easily and predictably manage our sprints. We’re firm believers in building applications that deliver immediate value to all members of the team, not just the C-level executive office.”
Not every stakeholder can handle the concept of “uncertainty”. What are your experiences with communicating schedules with the concept of range estimates and uncertainties explicitly in them?
“Going through the software estimation training class at Expedia was a transformative experience for us. We took to it immediately. In general, people understand uncertainty because they deal with it on a daily basis. How long does your commute take in the morning? 15-30 minutes? We have similar uncertainty in our project plans, and once people realize that they can capture this in a range and do something useful with it a light goes on. In our discussions with industry analysts and beta customers, we’ve had nothing but positive feedback. In fact, one of our most frequent comments has been “This is great, and estimating in ranges seems so obvious, why hasn’t anyone built something like LiquidPlanner before?” What executives want more than anything else from their teams is predictability. When you can see the uncertainty in your schedule, and set a promise date that takes that uncertainty into account, you’ve delivered profound value to a company. We haven’t had any trouble getting stakeholders to understand this.”
How do you educate people in the planning concepts underlying LiquidPlanner?
“We think ranged estimates are incredibly intuitive and teams naturally embrace them. Rather than making a single point estimate and having a business owner negotiate someone down into a least defensible position, a ranged estimate opens up a conversation. Again going back to the social aspect of project management, when you expose the low and high estimate you can have a real and honest discussion between team members about the work at hand. Why is this the worst case? What can we do to mitigate the risk? It really changes the dynamic of project planning and empowers the team to be honest without fear of being held to an unrealistic single-point estimate.”
What is your vision of LiquidPlanner? How will it look like in 5 years?
“We truly intend to transform project management; we think that in 4 or 5 years everyone will embrace uncertainty and estimate in ranges. We’ll continue to develop the platform and project environment, in particular by mining the rich set of project data to help teams be successful on future projects. For instance, we have the idea of building “project comps.” Much like real estate comps, we can show you similar past reference projects and guide you in creating successful future projects. We’ll also open up our API to better integrate with existing applications and continue to build out our feature set. At the same time, we always have the design goal of staying accessible, friendly and delivering value to the end-user.”
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LiquidPlanner: Interview with Jason Carlson
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