| I run a small bespoke software development company with 2-3 employees and 3-4 clients. It sounds incredibly small, but nevertheless I was getting overwhelmed. I evaluated various options and settled on liquidplanner, I don't regret it. - I can enter that some employees only work a certain number of hrs e.g. Mon/Tue/Wed 3 hrs, Thurs/Fri 8 hrs. If I say a task takes "20 hrs" then it takens the availability into account in the planning. - Range estimates for tasks, i.e. "this task will take between 4 hrs and 2 days". - I prefer the ability to update a task with "I did X hrs already, I now prodict Y-Z hrs to go", as opposed to saying "50% through the task, which was originally predicted to be X hrs.". As you go through a task, your understanding of it changes. I think updating the past/future hrs more closely fits how you work. - With many tools you can drag task bars to the left/right in the Gannt to make them earlier/later. I don't know why you'd want to do this? With LP you just specify how long it'll take and who's doing it, and its priority relative to other tasks, and LP tells you when you'll be doing it. - I often have the problem that employees claim they're "finished" and having nothing to do. I send emails around with bullet points but they still seem to get confused. With LP there is a section they can log into at any time called "my work" which shows them an up-to-date view of all their tasks, extracted from the Gantt, in order of priority. - My clients sometimes feel they don't know what's going on (if we're programming some back-end stuff, for instance). They get a better feeling when they see their Gantt. They can log in and do that. But I don't want my customers seeing each other, so they only see their Gantt. Nevertheless, the reality is that resources (e.g. me) are shared, so they're not actually independent projects/sheets. LP knows that I do task X before task Y, and task X might appear on one customer's portal and task Y on another's. - What tasks and employees should I be concerned about, in terms of them delaying the project? I can select any task and selects its critical path. Because resources are shared between projects and clients, it can accurately tell me that in order to get customer Y project done on time, I have to finish tasks for customer X (or re-arrange them.) |