I’m fairly new on this board, but have spent my career leading Services teams at product companies (Powersoft, Sybase, Allaire,
Macromedia, TIBCO, and now Endeca Technologies). I’m finding this group incredibly valuable, and thanks to all for your input.

We are challenged right now with improving our forecasted revenue and utilization reporting. When I joined this organization, we used an
Excel spreadsheet for scheduling - this was pretty basic in function, but made it very easy to include pipeline in the schedule - we would
“softbook” an engagement that hadn’t closed yet. This allowed us to see the true nature of our forecasted revenue and utilization, and if
we need to “push” out these softbookings, it was easy to do.

About a year ago we moved to QuickArrow for our PS system. The tool has a lot of strong features, but ease of use in terms of adjusting
scheduled resources is NOT one of them. I’m pushing HARD on our ops group to initiate “softbooking”, to improve our ability to demonstrate
forecasting ability, but they are complaining that the process of softbooking and then moving these softbookings when needed is too much
trouble in the tool.

I’d be interested to hear how others marry their “hardbook” and “softbook” opportunities into a single unified forecast for both
revenue and utilization - thanks for any input you can provide.