Liquid Planner versus Microsoft Project

Post date: May 28, 2012 1:51:34 PM

I used both tools in the planning and monitoring of projects and I would like to share my impressions on the most important aspects of their usage, comparing them using criteria that I found important. Both tools are valuable and have strong points that help in the process of project management, but their approach to handle certain areas are totally different.

This entry does not represent an exhaustive comparison between these tools, but rather presents the subjective opinion of a person that employed both in order to plan and track projects.

I will focus on the aspects that I found significantly different and which are worth to be taken into account.

First of all, there is the cost arena, especially the case when cost rates change during a project, I liked the tabel based approach from Microsoft Project that let you enter different costs in A, B, C etc. table entries for each resource. Then these can be mapped in the actual schedule by indicating the cost table inside tasks and resource detail views. In Project Planner, although such facility exists to a certain degree, one needs to export cost rates somewhere else (for example in an external spreadsheet) and update them externally and then import them into Liquid Planner again. This does not come naturally, being rather of an “integration” feature as a “built-in” feature.

In the schedule arena, I liked Liquid Planner priority based scheduling which discourages multitasking. I liked the interval based estimation approach for each task, the alerts available when constraints are to be broken and the highlighting of the most likely expected date for delivery of a certain task. Everything appears in a graphical, attractive and intuitive manner in the GUI and it is easy to stay focused. Although Microsoft Project offers the possibility of running a PERT analysis within a certain plan and the customization of PERT probabilities, the approach of handling this schedule estimation and tracking aspect is not so intuitive as in the case of Liquid Planner.

But the most interesting feature of Liquid Planner that I enjoyed the most was the approach of entering and taking people availability into account. No headaches with solving resource overallocation and other similar conflicts! This feature is not present in Microsoft Project where resource overallocation is more of an “after concern” that needs to be handled!