On Thursday, April 13, 2023, leadership from Tempo and LiquidPlanner hosted a fireside chat so customers and partners from all sides could learn how these companies came together and find out what’s happening next. 

Tempo Chief Product Officer, Shannon Mason led an engaging discussion with Tempo CEO, Mark Lorion, LiquidPlanner CEO Ted Hawksford, and LiquidPlanner VP of Product, Jen Morrisey on the future of their partnership.

Discussion included company introductions, a demo showcasing the magic of LiquidPlanner, what to look forward to in the product roadmap, and each panelist’s secret superpower wish. 

Introducing Tempo

Mark Lorion provided an overview of Tempo, one of the largest, most successful application providers in the Atlassian ecosystem and a leading provider of portfolio management solutions. He explained that Tempo has a unique, modular way of enabling customers that helps them solve their problems. 

Solutions range from roadmapping and idea management to capabilities in the project import and program management space as well as resource and cost management tools. Through these solutions, Tempo helps teams plan and identify what they want to work on, break it down into various work streams and then understand their capacity to get it all done. 

Tempo’s vision is to help customers unlock the joy of building, and its mission is to make sure they never build an unachievable, unpivotable, unrealistic plan again. 

Introducing LiquidPlanner

Ted Hawksford provided insight into company history, sharing how LiquidPlanner began 15 years ago because founder, Charles Seybold, saw that problems around managing priorities, adapting to change, and effectively deploying resources weren’t being addressed. What he experienced while leading projects across large enterprises was that teams were overworked, expectations were unrealistic, and software wasn’t helping. Charles set out to create a solution that would enable teams and project leaders to predict outcomes, anticipate what’s coming next, and adapt to manage workload in a more balanced, responsible way. 

All these years later, LiquidPlanner delivers on those promises and more as the only project management solution with a predictive scheduling engine to help teams plan and track their work, manage risk, and adapt to change in real-time. It builds the organization’s priorities into the planning process from the very beginning and optimizes capacity planning with automatic resource-leveling. LiquidPlanner harnesses the power of ranged estimation to capture uncertainty for best-case, worst-case scenario modeling. 

Why it makes sense for them to come together

Using Tempo, customers gain great insights into their plans, their capacity, and the ability to get work done. They can optimize the investments they’re making around their projects to align on strategy, prioritize portfolio initiatives, allocate resources effectively, and monitor the progress of their work. 

However, customers are struggling on the planning side. They experience difficulty adapting to change, determining when work will finish, if it will finish, and whether they could take on more. It’s particularly challenging when dealing with multiple products across multiple teams and geographies.

With planning such a critical component of their mission, Tempo began looking for a solution that could accelerate their ability to deliver even more value on the planning side. 

When Tempo learned about LiquidPlanner and met with the team, they looked to see how the products themselves might integrate, and whether there was alignment within the customer base. They soon realized there was a lot of natural overlap and discovered a shared passion for solving the challenges those customers face.

Coming together was seen as a natural combination that would accelerate Tempo’s ability to deliver more planning value to the installed customer base, and also help fuel LiquidPlanner’s further growth. 

The magic of LiquidPlanner

In the demo, Jen Morrisey showcased the predictive scheduling engine, underscoring its importance as a core differentiator and the base of what drives so much value for customers. She explained the many things predictive scheduling does, emphasizing that first and foremost, it helps teams build reality-based schedules. When change occurs, predictive scheduling shows what will happen next, so they can manage risk and adapt along the way. 

Because predictive scheduling calculates in real-time, it’s also very powerful for scenario modeling, helping teams find opportunities to go faster, and to move forward more efficiently.

LiquidPlanner roadmap 

The team shared that there’s a lot planned for this year including reporting, guest dashboards, timesheet locking, and in-app comments. 

Shannon, Mark, Ted, and Jen all expressed their excitement about exploring how to unlock more value for all customers through integrations between LiquidPlanner and Tempo products. Stay tuned for more news on that front! 

LiquidPlanner + Jira integration

Development for the Jira integration is underway, a proof of concept is ready and will be demonstrated at Atlassian’s Team ’23 event, April 18 – 20 in Las Vegas. Visit booth #24 to meet the team and see it in action.

An interest list is forming for the early access program. If you would like to participate let us know by submitting the form on LiquidPlanner’s contact page. 

Will LiquidPlanner remain a stand-alone product?

During the Q&A there were questions from LiquidPlanner Classic and LiquidPlanner New customers about whether or not they would remain stand-alone products. They received assurances from both Mark and Ted to allay their concerns.

Development is focused on LiquidPlanner New which continues to grow and welcome new customers. To learn more about the features available on LiquidPlanner New, have a look at the Release Notes and Feature Tip Videos on the blog or visit the Academy.

There isn’t a sunset date for LiquidPlanner Classic, the team is working to achieve feature parity between Classic and New so customers can migrate when the timing is right. 

What’s your secret superpower wish?

Shannon wrapped up the Q&A with one last question for the panelists, “Given all the options of superpowers out there. Which one would you choose?”

Mark Lorion, “I would love to breathe underwater. I love the ocean and water and nothing would please me more than to be able to swim with dolphins and whales and seals and fish.”

Jen Morrisey, “I would like to fly. I have loved heights since I was a little kid. So I have skydived. I have bungee jumped. I’ve done all the things and I love the feeling of soaring through the air.”

Ted Hawksford turned his camera around to show the amazing view from his home office window and said, “I would also like to fly . . . None are flying right now, but I get to watch bald eagles soar around, sometimes being chased by crows. There have been times when I turned my desk around because I’m so distracted by the soaring, and majesty that’s represented by bald eagles. So flying would be mine too.”

For the latest acquisition news, please visit Tempo + LiquidPlanner.