Forecasting

This section in PaceMkr generates forecasts based on your historical throughput. Once you've selected the throughputs in your run chart, the Forecasting Module will feed the data into its simulator to generate forecasts.

Configuring Your Forecasts

PaceMkr has settings to configure your forecasts based on your context.

Delivery Date

Set your project's delivery date. This value cannot be in the past as PaceMkr wants to forecast a delivery date in the future.

Start date

Set your project's start date. This value can be when you input the data (today) or when you believe your project will start.

Note that the delivery date can never be before or on the same day as the start date.

Scale Historical Throughput

This parameter is used to scale your team's historical throughput, which will help your forecasting.

For example, let's say you have three new full-time members starting in your team tomorrow. This change will impact your team's future throughput by accelerating your team's productivity. Your historical throughput might be between 2 and 4 completed items per week. But with three new team members, these throughputs might change to 5 completed items per week.

Use this field to express the increase or decrease in future throughputs. Defined as a multiplying factor, the value is initially set to 1 to feed the historical throughput. If you were to change this field to 1,25, this would mean increasing your historical throughput by 25% in generating your forecasts.

Number of Items

This field informs PaceMkr of the number of work items left in your project. This field cannot hold a negative value, and if you leave it empty, the forecasting of your items will be invalid.

Forecasts

PaceMkr is built on the premise that a forecast is always a probable value. The app generates dates and item forecasts and offers four scenarios with different pre-configured probabilities.

Forecasting Dates

PaceMkr shows four scenarios in the following way:

It's essential to know how to read these values. Notice how it says, "At least 91 items with 95% confidence". This section means that PaceMkr forecasts delivery of at least 91 items on June 21, 2022, with 95% confidence. Your team could also deliver more than 91 items. Still, with a 95% confidence value, you are projected to have 91 items by the delivery date you specified.

On the far-right of those results, there's a 50% chance your team will deliver at least 110 items for June 21, 2022. As your confidence level decreases from left to right, the number of delivered items increases.

Forecasting Items

Just like forecasting dates, PaceMkr presents four scenarios to forecast the delivery of a specific number of items:

Reading these forecasts is a bit different than reading the forecasted dates. When we read "April 25, 109 days or less with 95% confidence," it means that PaceMkr predicts that your team can deliver those 57 items either on April 25 or before that date.

At the other end, PaceMkr says there's a 50% chance that your team can deliver those items either by April 2 or before that date. As you decrease your confidence level, you get a date closer to today. There is less confidence that your team can deliver the number of configured items.