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Forecast is a team scheduling and capacity analysis software that helps you plan staffing needs, schedule your team across projects, and optimize time to ensure project success and a happy team. With Forecast, you can make smarter scheduling decisions by visualizing your project pipeline, scheduling your team fluidly, and balancing workloads to improve utilization.
Provider
Harvest
Located In
United States
Foundation
2006
Open API
Unverified
Deployment
Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based
Training
Documentation, Webinars, Videos
Support
FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Chat, Email/Help Desk, Phone Support
Create clear plans that rally your team with Forecast. Plan staffing needs, schedule your team across projects, and optimize time to ensure project success and a happy team.
Content Source: Forecast
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Forecast Reviews
Pros
Overall, it's a very helpful tool that keeps our business running. I think it's a great tool and would recommend to others.
I use this daily for scheduling projects and forecasting who will be available to work on what in the company. This is a great price of software...the subtle micro-interactions are a nice touch.
As a fan of Harvest, I find that working with Harvest forecast is just as easy to use. This is a great tool for anyone who doesn't have a forecaster built into their project management software.
Being able to sort and filter by different criteria makes it super simple to like at Product teams, functional teams, offices, etc. the visibility we've gained with a Forecast has been a game changer.
Cons
The product has many fundamental flaws. For example, if you charge a deposit for a project via Forecast, it doesn’t actually credit the deposit against completed work.
Both Forecast and Harvest are good - but the integration is horrible.
We use Forecast with Harvest to suck in projects and schedule the work our creatives will be working on. It serves as a pipeline so we know who's busy and who's got capacity.
That also means we can prevent time collisions for project planning purposes and figure out where we went wrong if timelines are missed.
"A good (almost brilliant) project management SaaS tool"
Overall: We use Asana and Forecast to manage time allocation to tasks, and use Forecast to plan out our resource allocation. Harvest Forecast seem to work well for us when planning work schedules over the next few weeks, but we do not seem to successfully use this for longer term project management. We use Harvest Forecast daily - it has become mission critical to the successful running of our business. However we resort to spreadsheets (and Asana) to manage longer term forecasts, and for this have marked it down a star. I suspect that this is not the fault of the software per se, but our work flow process from Asana making this just too clumsy. Still, Harvest Forecast a good, stable, well written piece of software. It is reasonably priced and one of the best methods to properly forecast project-based work.
Pros: Forecast is easy to use and does the job as a forecast management tool for us. The ease of use should not be underestimated - we have trialed many other project management tools and they were just too hard to set up. Moreover the integration to our Harvest itself (a time tracker) makes this much more powerful than a classic project management tool. We use it to manage our software development processes, which has a mix of short 1-2 days tasks and longer multi-month projects. Forecast and has some neat features: particularly like the quick way of setting up milestones. Forecast now also allows time planning around weekends so you can accommodate over time and will work in countries where the weekend is not Saturday and Sunday.
Cons: The integration method to Harvest Forecast is lumpy. You have to manually select which products in Forecast you import, and it is not perfectly linked, so change a name in, say, Asana and you have to manually fill this in. It is hard to include public holidays.
"Very convenient to use"
Overall: I was very pleased with my experience with Forecast and it is great for scheduling
Pros: Very conveniently helps you keep track of all of your scheduling needs
Cons: I didn’t notice anything that I didn’t like however some of the employees had issues updating theirs
Vendor Response
"If You Liked Harvest, You'll Love Forecase"
Pros: Super easy to use, the calendar feature is very straightforward and visually clear. Harvest had some bugs where their "scheduling assistant" feature often did not work, but I find that Forecast specializes in that feature. Keeping track of time and finding time to work with coworkers are extremely simple with Forecast.
Cons: If you are switching from Harvest, you do need to individually carryover all features one by one, which may be tedious. If you do not have a specific project you are working on but are working on internal projects or are helping a coworker with their project, it may be hard to track time because you need a preset "task" in order to track time. I'd recommended having a general "internal" task to track time for work that does not relate to an existing project.
Vendor Response
"Intuitive Time Planning Software That Adapts to Any Team Size"
Overall: The software works like a dream if your organization has the depth of project management/trafficking skill to understand how to balance its functions with the needs of the people captured by the system. This is NOT a great software for agile environments in my opinion.
Pros: Forecast (and its partner Harvest) make for a powerful program that can assist in planning any work that requires team effort. The process is easy, the interface readily understandable. Setup is very simple and new projects are easily managed in Forecast. You can be as detailed as you'd like, or very high-level. Perfect for traffic management, not so great for creativity.
Cons: This isn't a software for agile environments, and it's VERY easy for project managers to get caught in the objective of making red into green (a person is over budgeted time allotments versus a person has time to do the work) rather than thinking about what they're actually splitting or assigning. This can be a big problem in creative environments where team members may need large chunks of time for thinking, creating, or researching.
"Easy to use"
Pros: This tool has made it easy for me to schedule projects and forecast who will be available to do specific job at the company. It's so easily to use and it helps me assign task and distribute the workload.
Cons: For a large organization like ours having lots of drivers and big teams project visualization can get quite overwhelming.
