How do you monitor resources and measure success? Do you require access to insights that allow you to maximize resource efficiency and utilization, evaluate company portfolio performance, accurately track project performance and make on-the-go decisions?
With Forecast, monitoring and measuring performance has never been easier!
This article details the various ways to monitor and evaluate your resource management and financials and covers the following topics:
Managing your resources
Resource management involves planning, scheduling, and allocating people to a project or program. Essentially, it is allocating resources to achieve the most significant organizational value. Good resource management results in the right resources being available at the right time for the right work.
Forecast offers various ways to maximize your resources and utilization.
Schedule People
Schedule People is the hub for your resource management in Forecast. Understanding its multiple features and the way it functions is vital in understanding resource management in Forecast. The resource heatmap in the schedule people page is an interactive Gantt chart that allows you to plan your resource time for the coming days/weeks/months. Check out Reviewing your resource heatmap (Schedule People) to learn more about how to use the schedule to maximize resource utilization.
Schedule Projects
The heatmap provides an all-encompassing overview, that you can use to see all of your projects, their phases, tasks and team members working on each project. To learn more, check out Viewing your projects heatmap (Schedule Projects).
Project Timeline
Similarly to Schedule People, Project Timeline makes it possible to review and schedule the work for individual projects. Here it is possible to assign tasks based on individuals availability, determine the resources needed to complete the work, and plan the order in which the tasks should be completed.
To learn more about how to use Project Timeline, check out Viewing your Project Timeline (Gantt chart).
Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is forecasting the gap between supply and demand to determine if you have sufficient resources to take on or complete a project at an organizational level. You can determine demand based on a specific skill set and role using placeholders. Creating placeholders allows you to identify demand for a specific resource role and skill and plan the work required to complete the project without having to assign the work to a specific team or resource. Once a project is won and demand is confirmed, Forecast helps you identify available resources and allows you to easily transfer the demand from the placeholder into assigned work for an actual team member. Capacity planning also allows you to create and manage soft and hard allocations assigned to your resources.
Learn more about Capacity Planning in, About Capacity Planning.
Standard Reporting
Forecast's built-in reports are designed to help you monitor the success of your business by ensuring the overall strategy and vision are being executed through your projects.
Creating reports in Forecast is simple and takes very little of your time. You can create as many reports as you like and share them with anybody, even if they don't have a Forecast account.
See Getting started with Forecast reporting for more on our standard reporting functionality.
Advanced Analytics (Add-on)
In addition to Standard Reporting, Forecast offers an add-on solution, Advanced Analytics. Advanced Analytics help fuel growth by providing a platform for customizable reports, dashboards, and visualizations, using Forecast’s robust and accurate data as the foundation. Advanced Analytics also empowers you with intelligent insights to increase revenue, mitigate risks, decrease costs and drive efficiency across the business.
There is a wealth of power in Advanced Analytics, check out Getting Started with Advanced Analytics to learn more. Then, check out Getting Started with Advanced Analytics (Walkthrough) to start creating and customizing your first dashboard!
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