Step 3: Onboarding your team/resources

With any new system, onboarding and user adoption is key to success. Think back to the questions you asked yourself when first opening this guide: 

• Who are your key team members and stakeholders?
• How will you organize your teams and resources?
• Who will need access to Forecast? 
• What level of access will each user need? Are they managing clients, planning projects, performing administrative duties or otherwise contributing to project collaboration?
• What is your onboarding and rollout strategy?

This article will help to answer these questions and walk you through the set up and configuration of one of the most important aspects of successful project management: Your team!

In this article, we will cover: 

• Defining Permission Profiles
• Departments
• Teams
• Skills
• Inviting Users
• Support: How can I get help?

Defining Permission Profiles

Forecast offers 5 default permission profiles for users who will be assigned login access to the platform and 2 additional permission profiles that have limited or no access to the platform.  

See About Permission Profiles and how they work for details on the permission profiles and their corresponding level of platform access. Keep your key stakeholders and team members in mind while reviewing to determine which profile fits best. 

Forecast also offers PLUS customers the option to customize permission profiles. To see if customizing permission profiles is right for you, check out Creating and Managing Custom Permission Profiles (Plus only).

Departments

Now that you've identified who will be accessing Forecast, it is time to think about which departments these users may be part of.  You can follow your existing organizational structure or create a new one.

Adding department detail to Forecast will allow you to quickly identify resources, filter or drill down into financial reporting and effectively manage your project allocations or assignments. There is no limit to the number of departments you can create or the number of team members you can include in a single department, however team members can only be included in one department at a time

To read more on how adding Departments will maximize efficiency within your projects and throughout the platform, see Adding and managing departments.  

Teams

Similarly to Departments, creating Teams helps to streamline project management, task assignment and allocations and is worth giving careful consideration.  Think about:

• Your existing teams
• Which resources currently work together
• Who may need to work together in the future

Creating and defining teams now will allow you to easily add multiple resources to a project with a single click, drill down into reporting or filter various pages throughout the platform to a set team of users. There is no limit to the number of teams you can create or the number of teams an individual can be part of.  

To learn more about the benefits of creating teams, check out Adding and managing teams. 

Skills

To expand visibility over your team's abilities consider using Skills.  Skills allows you to identify your resource's strengths and capabilities.  Skills can be created and categorized to maximize your resourcing efforts in project allocation and task assignment.

Check out Setting up and using skills for more on how skills can enhance your resourcing experience. 

Inviting Users

Now that you've got your team and resource settings in place, its time to roll out Forecast to your broader organization. The size of your overall team may determine how you invite your users. 

• If you are a small organization, you can add users individually following the steps outlined in Adding and managing users.
• If you are a larger organization, you may opt to allow users join by domain. For more on adding users by domain, see Automatically allow users by domain. 

In either instance, it is important for users to customize their individual profiles and notification settings. To assist, share the following articles with your newly established Forecast team:

• Viewing and managing your Forecast profile
• Managing and viewing your personal Forecast notifications

Support: How do we get help?

Forecast Support is available 24x7 to help you and your team.  It is important to teach your team how to access and use the Help Center, a self-service support portal, to find helpful platform knowledge articles, reference material, detailed overviews, how-to guides, tutorials, FAQs and more. 

Along with the Help Center, Forecast offers the Customer Center where users can go to submit new support cases and update or track existing cases. Both Help Center and Customer Portal can be accessed via support.forecast.app. First time users will need to create a new account and should use the email address associated with their Forecast account.

Consider also enrolling yourself and your team in Forecast Academy to promote onboarding, upskill your team and maximize the value you get from the platform.  Check out Forecast Academy to see the wide range of self-driven certification courses aimed at enhancing your team's platform knowledge and promoting individual professional development.

There is a wealth of knowledge available to you and your team, you just have to know where to look!

To find out all about Forecast's support offering, check out Enhancing your Forecast Support Experience. 

Next up:  Step 4: Creating your first project