I’m not sure if you’re asking how best to use your selected tool or how people do it in general.  It’s been a while since I’ve used QuickArrow so I don’t think I could give you advice there.  They tended to answer questions like that for us so a call to support might be warranted to understand process.

We now use a tool called Projector and have found it pretty useful for soft and hard bookings as well as forecasted data.  We consider the report features one of the stronger components of the tool.  I can run a report that shows me actuals versus projected data.  I can see if a deal is a current engagement or a deal that’s still an opportunity (essentially a soft booked instance).  They have various views of the data in the tool itself that allows me to look at that as well.  It’s how we manage our resources with regards to future opportunities and work to move them around to maximize their utilization.

If I’m not answering your question please rephrase and I’d be happy to give it another shot

Don

Thanks for your input Don - much appreciated.

I guess I’m looking for input on both process AND tools that seem to be working well for others. We may yet figure out an
efficient way to do this in QuickArrow, but I’m always open to hearing how others are addressing our common challenges.

We use OpenAir for PSA and although it has shortocmings in reporting the bookings functionality handles the forecasting need very well. We use three booking “Types”: hard, soft, and corporate (for significant non-billable commitments). Once created its easy to change the type or resource on a booking.

From a tools standpoint, we use QA but purely for hard-bookings only. For soft-bookings, we export the hard-bookings to a spreadsheet and overlay the soft-bookings onto it.  This is because we roll-in all of our bookings into the sales calls (as we are a software company) and drive opportunities from there from a revenue forecast perspective.

However, from a utilization perspective, I manage them in 3 buckets: Hard-bookings, bid & proposal activities and internal non-billable (broken down into other categories).

Moving the soft-booking from a revenue perspective will have both a revenue impact and utilization impact. The revenue is easily done from the spreadsheet. The utilization, and hence, resource planning, is more complex and so we have developed a more complex sheet for that which allows us to move a ‘project’ in the future by months (that is currently the lowest unit that I plan with).

Not sure about the nature of your business - - but in ours, there is usually atleast a month that transpires between exchange of contract redlines and deal beginning. So, this is usually when I even contemplate soft-booking (for deals where redlines are exchanged). Otherwise, we tend to confuse projections with our own wishes!

At a previous company, we used OpenAir to replace QuickArrow for two reasons. First, it is very integrated with SalesForce.com, which was
our opportunity management tool. Second and more importantly, it could handle the forecasting needs of our business in a much more
user-friendly way than QA. Our business included retainer-based DBA services, traditional consulting services, staffing, and outsourced
application support. OpenAir, once configured properly, handled it all beautifully. As a previous post mentioned, a few simple
categories will get the job done well within the tool without some of the overhead associated with QA.

Best of luck to you in driving this process.

Last year, I was using QA for scheduling and we faced the same problem that you have. What I ended up doing was using a spreadsheet to
create my forecasts each week using data from QA and Sales Force. I created reports to extract scheduled work and backlog from QA (sold
work not yet scheduled) and then extracted the pipeline from Sales Force. In the spreadsheet, I would calculate my quarterly forecast as:

scheduled this quarter + forecasted backlog (stuff we thought we could get scheduled and delivered) + a percentage of pipeline (based on
sales confidence and my own knowledge of the deal)

Our goal was to be plus/minus 1% by midquarter. We never made it, but I became fairly good at forecasting after a couple of quarters.

We thought about the soft booking approach you mentioned, but was afraid it would become a maintenance nightmare, so decided to keep it
out of QA.