Scheduling your team is a fundamental part of Forecast. On average, our customers create 50,000 new assignments every week—that’s a lot! Today, we’re releasing a major update to scheduling in Forecast that offers you tremendously more flexibility when assigning:

  • Assign time in smaller increments than whole hours (e.g. 0.5, 3.68, etc)
  • Select 7.5 as an option for Max Hours/Day (this allows you to set a 37.5-hour workweek)
  • Quickly adjust the Total Hours for any assignment, instead of only its Hours/Day (more on this below)
  • Other workflow improvements for faster assigning

The above changes allow a wider range of scheduling options available to you in Forecast. You can now assign a project manager that is only sitting in on a 15-minute meeting (0.25 hours/day). You can also accurately book a 37.5-hour workweek without unnecessarily over- or under-booking your team’s schedules.

New Ways to Assign in Forecast

We want Forecast to be even better for high-level planning and have done just that by now allowing you to adjust the Total Hours for an assignment. Here are some examples illustrating how you can use this feature to plan at a higher level:

  • Hours/Week — You want your developer to work 30 hours on a project each week for the next few weeks. Simply create a Monday-Friday assignment, enter 30 into Total Hours to show hours/week, and repeat this assignment for as many weeks as needed.
  • Hours/Month — You plan to work 100 hours on a project for the entire month. Create an assignment from the first business day of the month through the last, and enter 100 into Total Hours.
  • Hours/Phase — You just won a new project and you want to assign 60 hours over the first three weeks to a designer. You can create one assignment for those three weeks, and enter 60 into Total Hours.

In each scenario, Forecast will do the math for you to break the assignment down to the proper Hours/Day. We’ve created a short, 2-minute video that highlights these new concepts. We highly recommend you watch it as you’ll learn some insightful ways to work faster in Forecast:

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to the team. Happy scheduling!