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Planview Customer Success Center

Update Forecast

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Update Forecast – Why and When to Use It

Over the life of a project, actual effort often differs from the original plan. As work progresses, project managers may need to re-forecast workloads to reflect actual work completed and adjust future planning accordingly.

A common example is month locking, where completed periods are finalized and future estimates must be updated without changing historical data.

Once triggered, the system automatically updates task assignments and resource planning based on actual work to date and the selected forecasting method.

What Update Forecast Enables You to Do

Using Update Forecast, project managers can:

  • Plan and adjust future task assignments per resource based on up-to-date effort information

  • Align budgets and forecasts with actual work completed, while planning accurately for upcoming periods

  • Lock historical assignments in completed periods, ensuring past data is preserved for reporting, audits, and financial accuracy

By preventing changes to past periods, Update Forecast helps avoid accidental updates that could distort reports, forecasts, or historical performance analysis.

Update Forecast allows you to keep your project plan accurate and reliable over time—reflecting real progress while protecting historical data and maintaining control over future planning.

Once the user selected 'Update Forecast', the system presents 3 options to choose from:

Option Method Name Description
1 Retain total work estimate and spread future work

In this method, the total work of the work item remains the same. The future task assignments are changed based on the difference between the total work and the actual work completed. 

Use this option when:

  • Fixed-scope or fixed-fee projects

  • Contracted implementation work

  • Situations where total effort must not change, but the plan needs to reflect reality
2 Retain future planned work assignments

Use this option when future task assignments must remain unchanged, even if actual work already performed differs from the original plan.

When Option 2 is selected:

  • The system preserves all future planned assignments exactly as they are

  • Actual work already reported is taken into account

  • The total task work may increase or decrease to reflect differences between planned and actual work in past periods

Typical Use case: Prepaid or contracted support hours
3 Update work for the entire task

Use this option when the remaining work is different than the (planned work minus actual work).

When Option 3 is selected:

  • Total Work Estimate: May change based on differences between planned and actual past work
  • Future Assignments: Updated based on the value entered by the user

Typical Use case: In-flight scope changes during implementations
Keep Manually Set Effort Values

available for all Update Forecast methods.

When enabled:

  • Effort values manually entered for specific periods are preserved.

  • This is useful for fixed events such as meetings, workshops, or scheduled activities that must not change.

  • After preserving the manually set values, the system recalculates and distributes the remaining portion of the task work across the rest of the planning period.

Note: If all task assignments were manually entered and were not generated by the system:

  • The Keep Manually Set Effort Values option does not apply.

  • During Update Forecast, the system will override existing values as part of the recalculation process.

 

How to decide which option to choose?

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