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For a professional services organization, the most important forecast to get right is effort. Improving forecasts improves utilization, project revenue, cost, and profit. This report allows you to measure and improve your forecasts. For example, back in the first week of December I predicted 1000 hours of work for February. How well did I predict February's workload that week? How about the next week? And the next? Hopefully I'm seeing that as February drew closer, my accuracy was increasing. If I know that I can fairly accurately predict 95% of my upcoming workload, then I also know that I can fairly accurately predict the revenue for that month too. In the screenshot below you can see forecast accuracy increasing as the delivery month approaches. You can also see how the ERP team faired against the CRM team.
Speaking of revenue, how come the forecast report doesn't take revenue into account? The answer is that revenue is a lot harder to track because how you measure it depends on how you run your organization. Do you deliver T&M or FP projects? Perhaps a mix? |
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To run this report type you must have the cost center permission Run Forecast Accuracy Report.
In addition, Engagement Engagement managers, project managers, and Can Act as PM users can all run the Forecast Accuracy report and see time/cost on their own projects. You must search using engagements in cost center to return any results in this case.
Prebuilt Reports
There are no pre-built reports of this type.
In Practice
To build a forecast accuracy report you can follow these steps:
Data Fields
Add Absolute Forecast Accuracy
Row Fields
Add Resource Title, Forecast Date
Parameters
Work Period = Last Month - the time period you are interested in analyzing
Forecast Dates = 30, 60, 90 days - the amount of lead time to measure accuracy
The resulting report looks like the one below. It shows each of your titles and how well you predicted your labor demands for Last Month. What you should see is that as the forecast time shrinks, your accuracy goes up.
Project | Forecast Date | Absolute Accuracy |
|---|---|---|
Engineer | Dec-01, 2023 | 90% |
Nov-01 2023 | 81% | |
Oct-01 2023 | 67% | |
Architect | Dec-01, 2023 | 80% |
Nov-01 2023 | 75% | |
Oct-01 2023 | 65% |