We all know the sad truth. No matter how much planning you go through, most project plans are at best inaccurate. The missing link? No one really knows how long it takes to do anything.

However, they usually can give a more accurate range. That’s the secret behind Liquid Planner. It’s a new, web-based project management tool. The big difference is that it lets you incorporate ranges and confidence levels, leading to a project plan that provides a best case and a worst case scenario. In fact, the system includes a feature that calculates the probability that individual tasks and the overall project will be completed by various dates. In this way, you can manage up and down at the same time and stop plugging in a fudge factor (that no doubt leads to a lot of anxiety).

In other words, as a project manager, you have a much better sense of when all of the pieces will come together.

For small teams (3 or fewer), it’s free. Larger groups will pay $35/month/user. While it’s not cheap, it may help save your skin.