In a blog post last week, I cited LiquidPlanner as a SaaS company that was tackling an important business problem—project management— in a new way (applying statistics to change guesses into estimates, thereby dramatically increasing the accuracy of project plans).Today, the company announced its 2.0 release. I'd like to call attention to a couple of new features in the release.
Integrated Microblogging
LiquidPlanner has integrated micro-blogging in its project management interface. This makes a lot of sense.
Thanks to Twitter, a growing number of people recognize the power and convenience of micro-blogging (posting short messages, perhaps containing links, that can be read by large numbers of people who opt in). Twitter, of course, is mostly a public forum, the exception being any hypothetical network of users who all password-protect their updates.
Internal business communications call for a separate, parallel channel to Twitter. Hence the launch of Yammer, a company that replicates basic Twitter functionality for closed communities, such as companies.
But Yammer's tweets or blog-posts aren't integrated with any other business software. It's unlikely that Yammer users are going to abandon Twitter, so it's entirely possible that someone might end up using:
- Twitter for the public commmunications
- Yammer for internal communications
- 37 Signals or Microsoft for internal project management
with no integration between Yammer and the project management program.
LiquidPlanner offers the advantages of Yammer—secure internal microblogging—with the added advantage of context and linking: I see find all the micro-blog posts related to a specific project, for example. Or put another way: now micro-blogged posts become another convenient information source for tracking the development of projects.
LiquidPlanner calls this feature "workplace chatter." It looks like this:
Users can see everything, including "chatter" and design documents, related to a project.
Time Sheets
Another new feature is time sheets. LiquidPlanner 2.0 offers built-in time-tracking, obviating the need for separate software to track the hours that people are putting into a project. Time-tracking data can be exported in standard formats for use in HR and billing applications.
Putting It All Together
These new integrated features make a lot of sense. In addition to posting documents and status, why not blog about a project and track hours, all in the same program? LiquidPlanner creates a workspace where customers can manage and record everything having to do with a project.
I expect we'll see more integrations like this in the SaaS market.
Disclaimer: LiquidPlanner is not a client.
Postscript to disclaimer: For information on becoming a client, contact me.
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2 comments:
John,
I don't see how exactly microblogging helps project management. Many tools today implement this feature, but I don't see the real value. Perhaps you could help me out here. Yes, it's a cool feature to have, but still not the most important. I agree that LiquidPlanner's Time Sheets can be of great use though. As for Liquid Planner, I think they'd better work more on their gantt chart. When I was evaluating their tool for our company, I found the chart interesting, yet not as sleek as in Wrike, that we finally went for.
Hmm. Myself I don't see how micro-blogging wouldn't be useful for project management. Project management, after all, is managing people working on a project, and micro-blogging makes it easy for team members to let their manager and each other know what they're doing. Heck, even the Wrike folks talk about the importance of creating a collaborative environment for project management. So I think it makes sense for just about any collaborative software product to support this feature or at least feeds from other micro-blogging platforms.
No one that I know of is saying it's the "most important" feature. But case studies at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and elsewhere strongly suggest that micro-blogging is a useful tool for teams, especially distributed teams.
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