Forecast Erfahrungen

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

- Adding notes to projects can be limited

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vorteile

I liked that this was integrated with Harvest when we were using Harvest. It made it super easy to use.

Nachteile

I didn't like the in flexibility of this product. I evaluated it for a while when I was using Harvest and it wasn't good for iterative projects or projects where you needed people working on more than one thing at a time.