Forecast Rolls Out Baseline for a Profitable Project Every Time

We’re delighted to announce Baseline, a new amazing feature that promotes full end-to-end visibility into the project’s success from day one and helps to align the sales and project teams around a common goal.

Unparalleled on the market, Baseline assists in predicting the profitability of a project and modelling out future portfolio financials, so you always know how the projects you are pitching will affect the bottom line.

With Baseline, Forecast supports all five phases of projects from quote to invoice. Let’s have a closer look at the benefits Baseline brings along.

• Aligning teams from the get-go
• Creating realistic plans
• Measuring the initial quote against final project delivery
• Making projects profitable
• Baseline for everyone

Aligning teams from the get-go

Historically, a big pain point for project based companies has been the misalignment across teams, especially at the initial phase of a project where the client facing team is pitching and selling projects. When the project team steps in, things often turn upside down.

Miscommunication among teams causes otherwise profitable projects to turn into trainwrecks. The Account Manager sells a Honda, the Project Manager scopes out a Ferrari. The problem isn’t that the AM is bad at selling, or the PM bad at scoping projects, it’s that in way too many companies the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. The PM only sees a lump sum assigned to the project budget, without enough context as to why it’s set that way.

Join us for a webinar here on Thursday 25th at 5:00 PM CET and get a live walkthrough of Forecast's Baseline from our Customer Experience team.

Baseline combines tools to tailor your projects to match what was sold and highlight inconsistencies before it becomes a problem. The new feature offers the ability to quickly check if the sales and project teams are aligned internally around the same goal and work against the same numbers. This is achieved through a close, real-time, connection between the Baseline and Scoping page. When the Baseline plan has been made, the financial information tied with each Milestone will be visually reflected in the Scoping Milestones.

Creating realistic plans

Project managers are often given unrealistic deadlines and expected to “figure something out.” Baseline is literally a godsend for everyone who wants to create feasible plans on fixed price and T&Ms projects. It helps project managers work back from a fixed price total and avoid unrealistic expectations in the end. The ease of use takes creating a project scope down to 2 minutes! The more detailed plan can be made in Forecast with the knowledge of the available budget, where project managers clearly see if the target is met or if they have to return to the prospect and adjust the proposal.

Measuring the initial quote against final project delivery

Think the last time you tried to understand how good your quote actually was. You were looking at what was sold, what was planned, and how that looked compared with the actuals. It must have taken you forever since knowing if the project is on track is always a back-and-forth process.

With the new release, you get the line to compare baseline to scope to actuals. The data points are automatically assembled and available at your hand. It means that you get an end-to-end perspective across all project phases - initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing.

Making projects profitable

Baseline allows the Project Manager to see the prices set for each stage of the project, and use that to quickly create a rough project scope that can be profitable at that price and still fulfill the customer’s vision.

Let me explain. Imagine that you’ve sold a project to $10,000 and you’ve ironed the project so the amount of tasks hits exactly that amount. But when you’re underway, the clients typically start contributing new ideas and requesting new features. Forecast’s data shows that 71% of tasks are created after the project start date. So what do you do? Well, it’s kind of obvious - you show them the Baseline, the agreed upon plan, and how that will affect the plan you all agreed on. Baseline will facilitate the conversation.

I’m almost 100% sure your client will appreciate this visibility and, in the long run, it will help them understand what, in their opinion might seem like a small change, isn't really small. So in the end, it will not only support you during these conversations, it will also help to educate your clients to fully understand what it takes to follow these ideas and fulfill a vision.

Baseline for everyone

With Baseline, Forecast unites cross-functional teams to ensure profitable projects every time. For executives, Baseline offers the ability to forecast financial pipeline based on the volume and probability of closing to see what’s ahead of them.

The transparency Baseline adds to a project enables everyone part of the project to feel secure and have the needed visibility to approach the future of projects from a wiser and more confident perspective. The solid understanding of what was sold, how to execute on it, and the ability to make an informed decision.

In essence, the way of uniting all phases of the project in one solution empowers the entire company with the confidence that we can deliver, we know what is coming up, and are certain that strategic decisions are made on a well-informed basis.

*Baseline is available as part of the Enterprise plan.