Complexity is increasing in projects. Project management requires several manuals, continuing updates to stay on schedule, on budget, and track.
The problem is escalating, which is where artificial intelligence can assist. It is where Forecast can help in your increasing projects.
Forecast enables growing teams to improve project planning and visibility into resource workloads across different projects. It enhances your team’s efficiency and project delivery through cutting-edge automation and a plethora of pre-built connectors.
Perfect for businesses looking for a single software solution to manage their whole project portfolio and resource allocation. The software connects with existing platforms — such as Trello, Slack, Gdrive, Githum, and Salesforce — and analyzes these many external data sources to determine the health of a project.
Table of Contents
Brief Background About Forecast
The Forecast is a Danish firm founded in late 2016 by Dennis Kayser. It describes itself as an artificial intelligence-powered project management system that automates manual project management duties and enhances project visibility and prediction capabilities.
The goal is to improve communication across teams through improved workflow and planning.
The Forecast says that customers may save between 20% and 40% on administrative work by utilizing its project management software and receive significantly improved visibility into project risk, resource management, and more.
How Forecast Works
Forecast is an all-in-one resource and project management platform utilized by agencies, software companies, and consulting firms in more than 40 countries worldwide.
It includes tools for managing everything from quotes to invoices and intelligent automation for predicting project delivery dates, forecasting capacity demands, and increasing efficiency.
Their AI builds rules based on user input using accumulated learnings from hundreds of thousands of projects.
Forecast visualizes your team’s schedule, allowing you to plan out future projects and make more informed resource allocation decisions. The color-coded visual plans in Forecast make it simple to assess how long a project is expected to take, who is working on what, and who is overbooked.
Forecast enables you to assign individuals to projects easily and then view your plans by project or individual.
When an employee is overbooked, a red bar indicates this, allowing you to rearrange tasks and deadlines before they burn out.
Additionally, it’s straightforward to determine when someone is available to take on a new assignment and how much time they have available. Share your plans with your entire team to understand what they should be working on and when they should be working on it.
Forecast can be used in conjunction with its sister software, Harvest, to gain insight into project progress and optimize your estimating and scheduling.
The integration syncs the hours scheduled in Forecast with Harvest, allowing you to determine precisely when a project will exceed its budget. Additionally, you may compare the time you allocated in Forecast to the time someone tracked in Harvest, allowing you to spot potential trouble areas.
Features
Forecast is an all-in-one intelligent automation platform that enables you to plan, manage, and track projects from start to completion. Here are the best features of Forecast:
- By delegating time-consuming project work to Forecast, you can save down on administrative costs.
- Manage every aspect of your business – from your entire portfolio to a single project, milestone, or task.
- With Forecast’s holistic Schedule view, you can make informed resource allocation decisions.
- Create a way for agile teams to generate superior results more quickly.
- Obtain a complete picture of each project’s revenue, cost, and profit created automatically from planned and actual work.
- The platform assembles insights into the future, past, and present of projects at any level of detail imaginable, enabling you to make winning strategic decisions.
- Forecast’s auto-schedule feature allows you to create a good project plan quickly.
- Forecast’s artificial intelligence learns from your prior work. It suggests the number of hours you typically log on comparable jobs to assist you in logging time more efficiently.
- Forecast automatically determines your project’s budget based on work estimations, rate cards, and internal hourly expenses.
- Drill down into the numbers and identify what requires immediate attention.
Pricing
Plan Lite: $27 per seat per month, payable annually. Ideal for businesses looking to handle projects and resources in a centralized manner.
Pro plan: $46 per month per seat, payable annually. Ideal for businesses interested in optimizing operations and finances to scale sustainably.
Plus plan: Contact Forecast for additional pricing information. Ideal for enterprises seeking to maximize efficiency and contribute to a sustainable future.
Pros
- Integrated resource and project management software
- Numerous pre-configured integrations empower all departments
- Project management with cutting-edge automation and certifications enabled by artificial intelligence
- Certification: GDPR, PCI-DSS
- Free-trial
- Free-version
Cons
- The data on milestones is consolidated rather than segregated
- Additional charges for onboarding and training
- A steeper learning curve
- Lack of integration with Asana
- Not as intuitive as Harvest
Other Alternatives
If you look for other alternatives, you can compare Project Insight and Smartsheet. While Forecast starts at $29/month with a free trial and free version, Project Insight starts at $9/month with a free trial and free version.
On the other hand, Smartsheet begins at $14/month without a free version but with a free trial.
Forecast is best for professional services firms to manage everything from quote to invoice in one AI-powered solution, without the administrative headache.
Project Insight is ideal for businesses that require sophisticated project management features such as scheduling, budgeting, time tracking, and capacity planning yet want a user-friendly platform.
Lastly, Smartsheet’s straightforward online project management app is widely used across enterprises to track and manage various types of work for teams of all sizes, from big companies to small and medium-sized businesses.
Overall Review
Benefit from an AI-powered project portfolio management platform that simplifies the management of projects and resources while also expanding to include a wide range of valuable features.
In contrast, Forecast previously targeted a specialized agency-type business model that did not align with other business models. With continuous refinement and input, the tool is becoming more aligned with what is expected.
Nevertheless, Forecast is a complete replacement for project portfolio management solutions used by professional service firms. It also provides transparency into all aspects of the project—the budget and financial portfolio report compile and present financial data in real-time, an essential bonus.
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