Forecasting for Successful Project Management

By Julia Baillie

How do you hand project management forecasting in your integration business?

One of the challenges Navigate often hears from project managers is a lack of ability to manage and forecast resources.

In this video, Brad Malone is joined by Brad Dempsey, CEO of Solutions360, to discuss how forecasting leads to more profitable and successful projects.

Q360 does an amazing job helping with project management forecasting, tell us the why and the how of that.

“One of the biggest problems we see happens when integrators don’t lay out their projects profitably right from the beginning,” says Dempsey.

“The first thing you need to do, before you’re worried about who’s doing what, is establish the timeline of the project. When do I need the different kinds of labor at a much higher level? You do not need to know this down to the week, but you should understand how many of those hours you are going to need, and in what months.

If you don’t start with this, then you’re never going to get any further in your forecasting.

The next step is to start overlaying sales forecasts with operations, “This is a big paradigm shift we see taking place,” says Dempsey.

“One of the powers of forecasting, that a lot of people don’t realize, is when we talk about sales forecasts, a lot of us just think, well I want to drive my sales team to sell as much stuff as possible. But that forecast exists for a lot of other reasons. One of the most important reasons, of course, is that if I build my sales forecast correctly, I can overlay that with my backlog.”

Once I overlay my sales forecast with my backlog, now I can make decisions about hiring and when I am going to need what discipline of labor, and that’s huge.

Watch the video for the full discussion: