The last few years of economic peril have caused companies to shrink, cut and slash. Now, with many of them at a bare-bones level of staffing, the question becomes how to increase productivity with those employees who are left.
One possible solution lies in a small office just off Richards Road in Bellevue.
LiquidPlanner, an online project management service, just celebrated its fourth anniversary. Founded by former Expedia veterans Charles Seybold and Jason Carlson, it gives businesses the ability to clearly and simply show the progress of a project.
“The project management market had kind of been asleep at the wheel for years,” Seybold said.
He said he saw this first hand at Expedia as it went from a small startup at Microsoft to the industry-leading travel giant it has become today.
But with growth came problems, Seybold said. With endless projects and a continually expanding staff, it became harder and harder to deliver things on time.
Seybold said the company tried numerous ways to manage projects better, but in the end, they had to fall back on spreadsheets. But as he saw the effectiveness of social media in people’s personal lives, he wanted to build something that would allow better interaction between employees, leading to more accurate communication about projects.
LiquidPlanner allows a company to register multiple users, each of whom can update progress and timeline of a project. It also allows users to create a range of dates for completion of a project, something Seybold said was difficult to do previously. Licenses to use the system cost $24 a month if paid for through the full year, or $29 for month-to-month licenses.
LiquidPlanner has now teamed up with Box, a file-sharing company that will allow companies to not only use project management services, but also create easy cloud access for any employee working on a project.
Seybold said the company has tried a few different programs, some that failed, others that have done better. When he left Expedia in 2006, Seybold took the summer off to work on ideas. With his partner Carlson, they decided to go with what they knew: solving problems. And according to Seybold, project management was a problem.
LiquidPlanner launched just months before the economic crash. But while this abrupt turn of events marked the death of many new companies, it actually helped the new firm. Applications to increase productivity became more popular, and people wanted to simplify, he said.
“With the financial crisis, suddenly this huge spotlight was focused on the operations of every company,” Seybold said. “These organizations now weren’t just competing locally, they were competing globally.”
Calgary, Alberta-based engineering company, Tangent Services knew it needed to be efficient to succeed in a global market. The company was having problems with short-term planning. Management would create deadlines for when projects needed to be finished, but how employees would get there from week to week proved difficult.
About three years ago, the company looked to LiquidPlanner to fix its dilemma.
John Person, vice president of the company, said the service made a big difference. It put the control of project timing into the people actually completing it, and in an organized fashion.
“Because it is easy for staff to use, we get high compliance with it,” he said. “People aren’t thinking it’s an extra administrative burden; it’s part of the project to use it.”
