Q&A with Ted Hawksford at LiquidPlanner
SourceForge recently interviewed Ted Hawksford, CEO of LiquidPlanner, a Planning Intelligence company that helps teams manage complex projects with ease and certainty. In this Q&A, Ted shares his thoughts on the real business value of capturing uncertainty in project planning and how to stop missing project deadlines.
CEO at LiquidPlanner
Why is on-time project delivery still so hard to achieve?
Project teams have developed many systems and processes to work together cohesively to deliver projects on time and within budget. Project management software can help to keep teams on track. However, even with sophisticated tools and a team of project managers, many organizations still end up delivering projects past the deadline. Some of the main reasons projects are still delivered late are:
- Unrealistic deadlines are set from the beginning
- Projects are accepted without real understanding of team capacity
- Managers lack real-time visibility of project risk
- Organization priorities are not clear
These common problems boil down to one holistic reason: uncertainty.
Uncertainty is inherent in project planning and life in general. In many project management software solutions, we can see bottlenecks, project dates and status. But usually, these insights tend to be realized too little, too late. Teams have already committed to a deadline, and there isn’t much they can do to achieve the original goal on time – aside from working overtime and outsourcing critical components.
How can you incorporate uncertainty into your project timeline?
Teams can incorporate uncertainty into their project plans through ranged estimation. Most project management software ends up falling short on accurately predicting project completion dates because they prompt the entry of fixed time estimates. And many people tend to be optimistic about how long it will take to complete a task or project. This is called the planning fallacy.
We’ve all heard the phrase; past performance is the best predictor of future performance. However, teams tend to be too generous in their recall of past performance when estimating how long tasks being planned will take to complete. Sometimes they think that since they completed the task once already, they will be more efficient the second time. While there is some truth to this belief, we still tend to underestimate time to completion and overestimate our abilities to be substantially more efficient. The second fallacy is that we often assume minimal complications will emerge that cause project delays. Positivity and a best-case scenario outlook are admirable qualities, but unrealistic optimism is how so many project managers fall short of expectations when initial plans and project timelines are crafted.
Simply stated – static estimates will not incorporate the inherent uncertainty into your project timeline. LiquidPlanner uses ranged estimation, a simple best case – worst case estimate, to capture uncertainty and display it in your schedule.
Why don’t more software tools incorporate uncertainty?
It’s surprisingly difficult to find project management software that has the ability to incorporate uncertainty. Even though there are more than 400 project management software solutions on the market today, it is not a very common feature.
LiquidPlanner is one of the only project management software products that incorporates uncertainty into the project plan. Our customers applaud that we do this through ranged estimation, delivering insights they can trust and the ability to confidently predict outcomes.
How does ranged estimation work exactly?
Consider how your team plans projects today. A fixed, static estimate that is likely an average of best-case and worst-case scenarios is determined and entered into a planning tool. By relying on fixed estimates, your team is likely delivering about half of the tasks on time and half past the deadline. Instead of estimating with an average, a range allows you to incorporate that best and worst-case scenario possibility.
LiquidPlanner’s range estimates are set on the assignment level. Users input their estimates from best case to worst case scenario for each task. These estimates then roll up to the task, project, and package levels to create a project schedule. Our scheduling engine then runs statistically correct calculations that incorporate probability to determine the likelihood of one outcome over another by factoring in all the other moving pieces within a portfolio of work. We take the analysis one step further by incorporating all the priorities across the entire organization to calculate when a project may be completed.
Our finish dates are therefore predicted in a range (best case – worst case outcomes) which is how we can predict completion dates with 90% confidence. The expected finish date is when you are most likely to finish (calculated statistically), and the latest finish date is when you would finish in the worst-case scenario.
What else can teams do to avoid missing deadlines?
Another important component to avoid missing deadlines is to see and act on risks before they affect the deadline. Flagging risks to be sure a team is aware of an issue and can then act to mitigate it is a key feature included in project management software.
LiquidPlanner has red schedule alerts that pop up when a project is at risk of being completed after the project deadline. You can quickly see if a person, task, or resource is constrained so you can quickly shift that work to another resource or adjust priorities to ensure deadlines are met.
It’s not enough to simply incorporate uncertainty, the team will also need to troubleshoot problems to the timeline as soon as they appear to stay on schedule. Many project management tools don’t have this feature, exposing teams relying upon that software to regular delays, frequent problems, and constant stress. I can’t overstate the importance of alerts to risk in project management software.
Final words?
We rely upon software to do the heavy lifting for us… things like detailed analysis, complex calculations and automating tedious data entry across a portfolio of work as circumstances change. No other project management software in the market today offers algorithms sophisticated enough to predict project completion dates with a high degree of confidence. LiquidPlanner’s revolutionary approach to project planning incorporates uncertainty into the project plan from the beginning. Its predictive scheduling engine automatically updates scope and priority as resource change occurs, alerting users of potential project risk in real-time. This level of sophistication helps teams plan, predict, and perform with confidence.
About LiquidPlanner
LiquidPlanner is a transformative project management solution that uses predictive scheduling to dynamically adapt to change and manage uncertainty. Their software helps teams plan, predict, and perform with 90% confidence in their project timelines. Complex Monte Carlo simulations run in real-time as tasks are updated and project priorities are shifted.
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