Forecast

A good (almost brilliant) project management SaaS tool

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Kommentare: I was very pleased with my experience with Forecast and it is great for scheduling

Vorteile:

Very conveniently helps you keep track of all of your scheduling needs

Nachteile:

I didn’t notice anything that I didn’t like however some of the employees had issues updating theirs

If You Liked Harvest, You'll Love Forecase

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Intuitive Time Planning Software That Adapts to Any Team Size

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

For a large organization like ours having lots of drivers and big teams project visualization can get quite overwhelming.

Predict accurately each project

Kommentare: Make precise calculations based on profits and benefits of each project in real time, knowing which of them is the most profitable and how the work team defends itself in each area to know what the strengths and weaknesses are.

Vorteile:

The main functionality or where the application is focused is the ability that gives you to correctly forecast and schedule each project in composite with workers as a team, but in which it differentiates to others, which allows you to calculate costs based on time spent , this is the main advantage, you can see the benefit at the time of each project, when it is profitable and when it is not, so you can project the profits, know when a project extends more than it should and how this affects the profits of the company.

Nachteile:

It lacks some tools based on the management of projects at times may be too simple in excess and this will affect you when you reuyeras complete functionalities for management.

Bird's Eye View for Project Planning

Kommentare: Forecast is a great little tool for project managers and directors, allowing them to organise and get an overview of upcoming tasks and projects for different teams as well as individual employees.

Vorteile:

Forecast was probably the best innovation from Harvest in recent years. Even though the parent tool is in dire need of a refresh, Forecast gives managers a bird's eye view of their upcoming projects, allowing them to individually assign tasks and distribute the workload.

Nachteile:

Despite the fact that it is a great forecasting tool, project visualisation can get a bit overwhelming on larger organisations with bigger teams.

Forecast has made utilization planning for our teams so much simpler!

Kommentare: The forecast has allowed us to move our utilization planning out of manually updated spreadsheets and into a tool built for the job. It's been awesome, and the added cost is nominal compared to the value it delivers.

Vorteile:

Love the integration with Harvest. 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.

Nachteile:

I wish it were a bit more directly integrated into Harvest (as opposed to living outside as a separate platform. As is, it's easy to accidentally create people, etc that aren't tied to a Harvest entry. Integrating would simplify our toolset as well, giving us one place to go to manage time tracking and team planning.

Project Management Essential Tool

Kommentare: Overall an easy to use interface for scheduling a team of staff for a variety of projects.

Vorteile:

Easy to use, simple interface. Clear colour coding allows for easy project scheduling.

Nachteile:

- Adding notes to projects can be limited

Nice planning tool

Vorteile:

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. Great for organizing your and your teams time and planning your upcoming work.

Nachteile:

I like all aspects of this software including pricing. It would only be better if integrated into a project management software like Monday.

Good product

Kommentare: Overall, it's a very helpful tool that keeps our business running. I think it's a great tool and would recommend to others.

Vorteile:

It makes it easy to schedule our team's days and weeks while also prioritizing projects. It also is helpful per team member to keep track of your projects, and set milestones for the projects ahead of time.

Nachteile:

The only thing I don't like about this software is when you shift things around if a new project comes in or an old drops off, it's a little challenging to do because you have to click every single element after that project. Would be easier if there was a "bump" feature of some sort.

Useful tool for planning team members' time but not the most intuitive

Kommentare: Overall, Forecast is a time saver for managing teams, and the feedback from the team members is that it helps co-ordinate their week ahead and know what they need to be working on. If they can work on improving the design and layout, it could be the perfect team management system.

Vorteile:

Forecast's direct integration with Harvest (time tracking) makes it a simple and easy process to assign tasks to a team member in Forecast and have it automatically appear in Harvest for them to log time against, helping streamline the process and reducing the number of steps.

Nachteile:

While the interface for Forecast is fairly easy to use, it isn't all that intuitive. It can be difficult to see what a team member is working on, and if there's a few people on the team, there is a lot of faffing around to open up each team member's list and see what they're assigned to.

Forecast is great for project management for timelines/resources -- goodbye static gant charts.

Kommentare: We get an agreed upon view of what is going on -- our management knows the project schedules and our employees know where they will be allocated in the future. That also means we can prevent time collisions for project planning purposes and figure out where we went wrong if timelines are missed.

Vorteile:

The reporting and planning of project timelines is so simple with forecast. Once you learn where the UI controls are, it is easy to report over timelines and view data. I love that you can zoom in and out between how granular data is. It is really easy to tell what is going with just one glance at the screen.

Nachteile:

Setting up clients, employees and projects can be cumbersome. Once the entire thing is set up, it is easy to modify or edit -- but getting our things in order to get it all inside of forecast took some time. That combined with slower page load times on the app (when we were using it at least) made it a bear to onboard.

An early beta product that doesn’t work, with a premium product price and arrogant culture

Kommentare: When we raised issues with the product, they refused to accept the premise of the issue and ridiculed us. When it finally became impossible to reject the obvious flaws in the product, they asked us to help them design the solutions. I have no issues giving ideas to a startup to help them improve the product, but I am less inclined to do so after being treated poorly.

Vorteile:

What it is supposed to do, in theory, is a great concept. However, in practice, it doesn’t deliver and is a waste of time and money.

Nachteile:

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. It is a half baked beta project.

Both Forecast and Harvest are good - but the integration is horrible

Kommentare: Recommended if you only need one or the other tool ... but don't use it if you want to use the (logical) combination.

Vorteile:

Every one of the two tools (Harvest / Forecast) does what it should do. Using it is easy as long as you don't want to combine those two tools.

Nachteile:

The integration of Harvest and Forecast (which is meant to go together) does not work at all. The process is not thought through and is highly unintuitive. Just to give you one example. In Harvest Users can't create clients (only admins) but in Forecast everyone can create clients (you can't even change this setting). However to link projects and clients obviously they need to have exactly the same name AND you have to do it manually. So now that I have trained 30 people in NOT creating a new client (although the tool allows them to) I have learned that if I try to centralize this process to solve the problem described above I cannot archive a project only in one of those 2 tools which means that now I have a problem because Forecast is not build to keep a good overview about 100+ projects whereas this is no problem in Harvest.... Really terrible. I believe the product manager (who by the way does not want to talk to me although I asked for) has never actually used the process himself.

Simple but limited

Vorteile:

The ability to quickly edit timelines and assignments is fast and easy.

Nachteile:

You can easily integrate it with other services and the reporting is very limited.

Great online project allocation software

Vorteile:

Forecast is an easy to use application for project allocation. I use this software to set up team members allocation across 9 teams. It's an easy way to see what the allocation is for each one and to keep track of off days as well. The management of the applications is easy and intuitive, set up is quick and team management is as easy as clicking or dragging.

Nachteile:

The way filtering is handled is ok, but it could be better on how to view allocation across multiple team members.

Great tool for tracking and updating team members' schedules.

Vorteile:

(1) Great UX, low learning curve (2) Visual representation of team members schedules, their projects, and tasks (3) Added functionality for when team members are "overbooked" or "under-booked"

Nachteile:

Less useful for larger projects that require multiple, dedicated team members for a long period of time.

Forecast is great lightweight tool for planning project and team capacity.

Kommentare: Easy to use capacity planning software for understanding the capacity of my teams!

Vorteile:

I'm a project manager who has tried MANY different forecasting tools. I was frequently frustrated by forecasting tools that were too exact and cumbersome for agile planning for small teams. Forecast is a great lightweight tool for estimating and understanding capacity of your team in one view.

Nachteile:

This tool would make my life even easier if it had some type of automated reporting that would give me historical data on my teams capacity and project durations for future planning.

Its really good

Vorteile:

I really like how it connects together, when I am working on a task, I can just choose that specific tasks, without me writing it. Also I like that it is an app. You can have it in your computer, not the browser.

Nachteile:

I would not use it myself because it is a bit too expensive for me.

One click forecasting that integrates with Harvest

Kommentare: We use Forecast because of its integration with Harvest. Unfortunately, we are not usually able to use it for much beyond its visual representations of individual team schedules week-to-week because of the lack of reporting tools. It requires a lot of additional work inside Excel to filter down to anything useful.

Vorteile:

Harvest integration ties in with your existing projects

Nachteile:

Non-existent reporting means you need to export a CSV and create your own reports.

Super easy software for managing teams

Kommentare: Love it

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

I wish it was easier to modify multiple peoples schedules at once.

Tool that can help to take the hassle out of team utilisation planning

Vorteile:

We use Harvest to track time spent working on clients and so we use Forecast by Harvest as it fully integrates. Being able to filter between teams e.g. client team and product team makes it easy to see how people are spending time and where there are opportunities to re-distribute work.

Nachteile:

It can be easy to accidentally create people in Forecast that aren't linked to a Harvest entry which means you have to remove the person and start again. This tools pretty basic and doesn't offer much historical reporting on how the team have been performing over time.

Gantt Charts FTW!

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

Super slick way to schedule people's work and see where the bottlenecks lie in our future workflow.

Nachteile:

Wish you could choose to not schedule people and schedule only projects/tasks instead. Sometimes we don't know who will be working on what until it's time to be worked on.

I love it!

Vorteile:

I've been looking for a tool that helps me plan my availability and capacity in advance for ages and I've recently found this one. It's amazing and does what it says on the tin. It's so intuitive, I didn't even need the how-tos or any other instructions to get started.

Nachteile:

It needs a web app. It works on mobile but not very well and basically shows you the desktop version. Far too much scrolling.