Project management software has a difficult history. Traditional tools have been inflexible, hard to use, time-consuming and often unreliable. LiquidPlanner set out to change this from inception. One of the ways we did this was to include a collaboration platform in our project management solution—one that every member of the team could contribute to and access.

A Participatory Approach to Project Management

“We’ve always felt that project management should be democratized,” says LiquidPlanner co-founder and CTO, Jason Carlson, who set out to build a PM tool that he wanted to use. This democratization is an important shift. A collaborative platform empowers team members to take responsibility for their part of the project—updating their work and making estimates. It lets project managers actually manage projects—remove roadblocks, help team members get their work done, communicate with stakeholders—rather than run around gathering status updates and managing a document.

This last action is a difference maker. When estimates are made by the people actually doing the work, you get schedules that are realistic and reliable.

Setting Clear Priorities

We all know that priorities are important; they have the potential of holding back a project when they change or aren’t clear. LiquidPlanner was created on the belief that communicating and setting priorities is the single most important thing you can do to make your team more effective. That’s why priorities drive the schedule in LiquidPlanner, and it’s easy to prioritize and reprioritize work.

Every time a task or project order changes, the schedule updates to reflect the new timeline. Team members can see what they need to work on every day, how a task might impact others and how their work moves the entire project forward. Managers can see what team members are working on, track progress and reallocate resources as needed. Stakeholders can also see how the project is progressing, and how any new feature requests and changes impact the schedule. Everyone’s on the same page. No unpleasant surprises!

The beauty of an all-access, transparent, democratized project management system is simple: It helps everyone do their job better, to deliver higher quality projects to satisfied customers. This is also how organizations thrive and beat out the competition.

Watch Jason talk about democratizing of project management, and other incoming trends in this following video.

If you’d like to learn more about the methodology behind LiquidPlanner’s collaborative system, download our eBook Introduction to Dynamic Project Management.

This is the ninth and final blog in a 9-part video series featuring LiquidPlanner CTO and co-founder Jason Carlson. These short clips tell the story of creating LiquidPlanner; describe how probabilistic estimation reduces project uncertainty, and share Jason’s insider expertise on creating the only resource-driven scheduling engine on the market and what makes our Dynamic Project Management unique.  

Tatyana Sussex coaches entrepreneurs and professionals who are launching a business or reinventing their careers–in short, she guides people through the process of creating something new. She specializes in messaging coaching for entrepreneurs who want to develop their brand, voice and professional presence, get their story into the world and connect with the right people.