Foresight Connect is a resource management tool. It allows you to manage the processes of running a professional services company. Our advanced system can track time off and calculate utilization, helping you make management decisions that increase your company's profitability.
Table of Contents
Short-Term vs. Long-Term Planning - What's the Difference?
What type of planning should I use?
What does long-term planning look like at Foresight?
People and Project Planning in Foresight Connect
Examples of Calendars in Foresight Connect
Reporting for Long-Term Planning Needs
Short-Term vs. Long-Term Planning - What's the Difference?
Short-term planning refers to plans with a maximum lead time of two weeks. In the IT industry, short-term planning is typically used for planning Agile sprints and the tasks they encompass. Consequently, it is usually employed to create detailed schedules that allow specialists to better manage their workload.
On the other hand, long-term planning is more tailored to managers' needs. It allows them to create plans for months or even years. Additionally, such schedules include other valuable information, such as expenses, profits, or utilization. As a result, they can be used to draw overall conclusions about the company's condition and forecast its future situation.
While short-term planning is usually the responsibility of the scrum master or project manager, long-term planning is the domain of the resource manager.
What type of planning should I use?
The correct answer to this question is both, but if you are an executive director or a high-level manager, you must focus on long-term planning for your company's development.
While short-term planning provides project managers with the necessary information to complete a project and helps specialists organize their work, focusing solely on this type of planning can harm the company in the long run. This is due to the need for more forecasting, which results in difficulty in predicting risks and obstacles that could threaten profitability. In other words, short-term planning can assist in managing a single project but also forces the company to put out fires instead of creating opportunities.
Long-term planning essentially ignores sprints and individual tasks. It focuses on a broader picture of the company's operations, primarily catering to the needs of high-level management by providing them with information on:
- Key performance indicators, such as profitability and utilization,
- Sales issues and project pipeline signaling the need for acquiring new projects and upcoming cash flow problems,
- The current and future profitability of the company,
- Company's expenses and revenues, including employee costs and overheads,
- The project schedule for both existing and future operations, including allocations and their costs,
- Any scheduling conflicts that could jeopardize projects,
- Any potential improvements in any of these areas.
As a result, long-term planning helps management find new opportunities for their operations while ensuring that they avoid unnecessary risks—and that's precisely why adopting this planning method ties all leading IT companies together.
What does long-term planning look like at Foresight?
Let's not dwell too much on theory - instead, let's see what long-term planning in Foresight entails and, more importantly, how you can benefit from its approach to such scheduling.
People and Project Planning in Foresight Connect
In Foresight, you can oversee long-term planning from three perspectives: projects, people, and demand.
By choosing long-term planning for your staffers, you will see:
- Personal data, such as position, seniority, department, and most importantly, planned utilization for the selected period,
- Allocations are planned for each staffer, where each project is marked with a different color, and their phases are specified on a darker bar. This field also contains the exact number of hours the employee should spend working on this project, along with the hours they have already worked on it and labor cost information,
- Their free time and absences indicate their availability,
- They reserved time in white bars.
The system also includes information about non-working days affecting people's performance.
Moreover, each displayed allocation can be changed immediately by dragging and dropping the bar or clicking on it for more details. You can also create a new allocation by clicking on a spot in each person's section.
Examples of Calendars in Foresight Connect
If you are more interested in seeing all allocations for a specific project, you will prefer to use the long-term project planning view. This view provides the same information as the people's calendar, but it is limited only to allocations for a specific project.
Team Members Calendar in Foresight Connect
Projects Calendar in Foresight Connect
Reporting for Long-Term Planning Needs
Of course, the calendar is not the only function of long-term planning that you can use to get a broader view of your operations. The reporting feature is also perfect for this!
In the Reports Tab, you can find reports for:
- Utilization,
- Availability, allowing managers to forecast the size of their workforce bench,
- Project finances,
- Custom Report.
Go to the Reporting section to find out more about reports in Foresight Connect.
Utilization Report in Foresight Connect
These reports can show managers their company's actual condition now and in the future. For example, the utilization report (shown above) can provide information about current utilization and—in this case—its lack in the future.