Forecast vs. Planview ChangePoint

Forecast is well suited to track resources throughout a project or account lifecycle. The biggest benefit Forecast offers is the ease of scheduling resources across upcoming projects. This allows managers to confirm that projects are fully staffed or see which resources are over-allocated. This often will lead to department heads to analyze teams and determine whether more resources are required to be hired.

Incentivized

Changepoint is well-suited for consulting firms and other companies that charge clients for their time and have a need for significant project-management capabilities along with reporting and invoicing. It is not well-suited for companies that want a more basic solution to time reporting and expense reimbursement. The key questions to ask during the selection process revolve around this basic question: how are you going to use this software? Though it has a lot of functionality, the learning curve is steep and basic functionality is not as easy as one would expect.

• Assign and allocate resources.
• Identify lean departments and identify areas to increase headcount.
• Manage agile teams.
• Identify bottlenecks in departments or resourcing.

Incentivized

• There are lots of reporting options. Once you figure out how to work the parameters of a report, the system is able to provide detailed and accurate compilations of data. There are also many custom reports than can be setup, as well. In my experience, we have told Changepoint PSA administrators what kind of report we were needed and they set it up for us, available in a 'custom reports' folder.
• You can have several things open at once -- 'portals'. These are up at the top of the screen, much like how Google Chrome has tabs at the top. This is useful.

• Not as intuitive as its companion software, Harvest. This software takes longer to learn when on-boarding new staff. It is also difficult to view time notes without needing to physically open them up. This could be improved by expanding the "on hover" functionality. Personally, having spent as little time in workflow software is really important, as it gives me more time to code.
• Because we use this software to plan schedules, items often fall through the cracks. I would like to see some more sophisticated syncing with not only Harvest but also with Asana.
• Lack of integration with Asana. It would be nice to pull data from forecast and display it in Asana. This would be helpful for understanding how much time I have to spend on a project rather than bounce back and forth between web apps.

Incentivized

• The site could become slow with high volumes of traffic. This may have been due to the way that our infrastructure was setup.
• Analytic reporting was not available in the version that we used. We created external reports to slice and dice the data and view it as the business demanded.

Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.

It could be more intuitive and user friendly.

I have not needed support for Forecast.

Incentivized

I have not used any other scheduling software other than Forecast. The company selected Forecast because it is used in conjunction with Harvest. The pair of web apps can be used to pull detailed data. This is very important to our agency, and making data-driven decisions is exceptionally important to our agency mission.

Incentivized

The system predates me as I was not working for the company when the solution was chosen - I understand this may have been an 'overpromise, underdeliver' scenario. However, we are now moving towards replacing it with Supportworks - and having seen Supportworks in action I genuinely cannot wait to switch from Changepoint and move on...

Incentivized

• Forecast does not integrate with other software in our workflow, and it makes it an entire extra step when it doesn't necessarily need to be. This takes extra time away from my actual job.
• Forecast is powerful when used with Harvest, and allows for powerful data-driven decisions in hiring and project estimates. The more informed we are when making decisions and scoping, the more profitable the company can be.
• It takes some time to onboard new Employees which can take time away from a profitability or other training.

Incentivized

• Our ability to maintain a global IS Scorecard helped us to maintain a focus on completing projects on time and within budget.
• Having a single instance of Changepoint with projects aligned to specific portfolios helps senior management to maintain a focus on the investment of IS resources. It is foundational to our governance processes.