The path to powerful services forecasting
In the ever-evolving new services economy, forecasting is becoming more important than ever. With services broadening and becoming more dynamic—from strictly professional services to managed services, technology services, and beyond—organizations must evolve their business practices. Forecasting, already a challenge for traditional services businesses, has grown even more complex with the rise of new services.
EBOOK
POWERFUL FORECASTING AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
How can we as services leaders adapt our forecasting to account for these new revenue streams? In order to best answer that question we need to break forecasting into three categories:
- Service knowns
- Unscheduled backlog
- Service pipeline
Service knowns entails the forecasting exercise known as a bottom-up forecast. It’s pretty much just as it sounds: forecasting what we know, meaning anything in our system with a date and a value. Unscheduled backlog and services pipeline are the most difficult elements of any service to forecast because there is not yet any resource assigned or delivery plan in place.
To overcome this challenge, Certinia has built delivery curves that allow organizations to model how products, opportunities, or projects will be delivered. This is done without adding any schedules or milestones to the system so as not to inflate utilization or capacity. By using delivery curves, service organizations can realistically model how unscheduled backlog and pipeline will be delivered based on data analysis of past deliveries.
To learn more about services forecasting, download this ebook, Powerful Forecasting at your Fingertips – giving you all the insight to go beyond the forecasting fundamentals, covering things like how to use delivery curves to best forecast pipeline and unscheduled backlog, accurately forecast every dollar in your pipeline, use scenarios for best results, and what AI will ultimately bring to the table.
