Ever tried to build and maintain a project plan across multiple sites by emailing copies of MS Project? I have and it’s not pretty.

Liquid Planner is one of  growing number of online services that allow collaboration on projects across the internet. Unlike  many of these services, this one comes with a strong planning tool and uses this as focus for its structure.  Basically this solves the problem above; managing a complex plan between several sites. It brings other features as well, but is it just too clever?

The core of Liquid Planner is it’s sophisticated planning tool.  I consider myself to be reasonably competent with planning tools but I am no expert. To me,  Liquid Planner seems to have all the features you could possible want in a collaborative planning tool but I have not made  an exhaustive list. It provides a rich feature set for sharing the creation and management of the project plan, groups of tasks  or individual tasks.

In addition, files can be uploaded as attachments and shared.

The interface is smooth and attractive and there is plenty of material to assist the new user, such as videos, downloadable guides, and a forum. So what could be wrong with this?

• First the price. There is a 30 day free trial version, then it moves to US$25 a month per user if you pre-pay 12 months in advance. Since it’s main point is sharing between users, this will mount up pretty fast.
• Then we have version control. My experience is that sharing between multiple sites requires strong version control of all project documentation. Liquid Planner did not seem to offer anything in this area. Even the main project plan did not seem to have any form of version control. I suspect that this could render the whole exercise  useless.
• Finally, like all sophisticated planning tools, I could see a reasonably steep learning curve ahead. But so many projects do not really need this complexity so why would people with those projects bother to tackle the curve? In my experience, rather than come up with complex lists of tasks,  the Project Manager’s time would be better spent developing a product based plan with fewer but well thought through products (that’s deliverables to those of yo who have yet to complete the PRINCE2 course).

However, I ave been watching Liquid Planner for a while and will continue to do so. It is still developing a quite a rate.