Having an accurate forecast of a project is not just a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have. In a rapidly-paced Agile world, the ability of a team to predict timelines, assign resources, and manage dependencies is as important as the project itself going well. Using traditional means of estimating projects - spreadsheets, manual calculations, and approximations from experience, do not serve us well. They are all error-prone, do not scale well, and can create inefficiencies across teams, projects, and budgets.
This is where Baseliner AI comes in, a first-of-its-kind project estimation tool that leverages AI technology to fundamentally improve the way Agile teams forecast, plan, and execute projects. Baseliner AI integrates predictive analytics, historical sprint data and thoughtthrough recommendations to not just make forecasting simple, but gives organizations of all shapes and sizes a tangible return on their investment (ROI).
In this blog, we’re going to look at Baseliner AI and how organizations leverage Baseliner AI to optimize project forecasting, improve efficiencies, and generate real ROI.
The Challenges of Traditional Project Forecasting
Prior to exploring how Baseliner AI can help, it’s worth understanding first the limitations typical project estimation processes pose. Many organizations continue to use manual processes, causing teams to invest hours extracting story points, spent estimating time needed to finish tasks, and trying to estimate resource availability.
The following are common challenges:
Estimate Inaccuracies: Manual estimates are subject to influence from human bias, assumptions or incomplete data. Teams may misinterpret their capacity, or underestimate potential dependencies or risk that, collectively, add up to an unacceptable delay.
Dependency Complexity: Dependencies are easy to overlook in multi-team or cross-functional department projects, which can create bottlenecking, rework, and delays to the project, leading to inefficiencies overall.
Resource Inefficiency: Managers may assign and plan work for certain teams without an understanding of workloads and resource capacities, creating some fully-utilized teams and others under-utilized, reducing productivity, and leading to burnout.
Reactive Changes: Many organizations find their challenges only too late and are forced to respond, adjustments that will generally be costly and time consuming. The result of this is missed deadlines, blown budgets, and unhappy stakeholders.
These all account for return on investment. Inaccurate forecasting causes both project delays, but also lost time, lost funds, and wasted resources for team.
How Baseliner AI Transforms Project Forecasting
Baseliner AI tackles these challenges and infuses intelligence and predictive capabilities into Agile project estimates. Baseliner AI utilizes machine learning algorithms, historical sprint data, and predictive analytics to generate actionable insights for teams and managers, which is a big leap away from estimation methods of the past or traditional methodology.
This is how Baseliner AI enhances forecasting for projects:
Predictive Sprint Forecasting: Baseliner AI looks at historical data of past sprints and accurately estimates how much work a team can accomplish in future sprints. This increases the reality of the planning and will help to eliminate the problems of over-committing.
Forecasting Resources across Multiple Teams: Baseliner AI considers dependencies and workloads across all teams when mixed teams are involved in the project. This helps the manager make better assignments for team members so that one team isn’t over committed while another team isn’t working at full capacity.
Proactive Recommendations for Managers: Baseliner AI not only retires the time *team* forecasts and provides actionable insights, but if the system demonstrates a potential bottleneck in a sprint the Baseliner AI system will flag that to the manager early.
Improved Learning along the way: Although the model did an adequate job forecasting the multi-team workload, Baseliner AI did feed the data back into the system for the next sprint. Each completed sprint builds data back into the system to improve accuracy and effectiveness of forecasts.
By eliminating these time-consuming tasks, Baseliner AI saves many hours of manual process each week, reduces lapses of accuracy and provides both an actionable and timely prediction for project forecast.
Quantifying the ROI of Baseliner AI
The ultimate evaluation of any tool is the value it brings to the equation, and for organizations leveraging Baseliner AI, they will see the bottom line contribute to organizational value in at least three different ways:
Reductions in Time: The amount of time spent in manually estimating a project can take up a sizeable percentage of the team’s planning hours. Baseliner AI automates most of this work. By leveraging historical data and establishing predictions on the spot, Baseliner AI is able to reduce planning time by approximately 50%. This enables project managers and teams to focus more on project execution, rather than engaging calculations, which reduces the total duration of a project lifecycle.
Reductions in Cost: Cost overruns often occur due to uneducated project forecasts. Baseliner AI can help organizations avoid overstaffing, being understaffed, and being behind schedule. Baseliner AI provides understandable project forecasting, ensuring project managers and teams are properly allocated. Teams can then avoid reworking by properly estimating project numbers, leading to savings on labour and operational costs.
Improved On-time Delivery: Arguably, the strongest ROI will come from measures on 'consistent on-time delivery'. Baseliner AI is a predictive measure, suggesting estimates based on previous estimates, and thus predicting realistic project forecasts to complete deliverables. Not only does this improve customer satisfaction, but it reduces the financial and reputational cost of late project delivery.
Improved Team Efficiency: An equitable workload is important for productivity. Knowledge from Baseliner AI plays an important role in mitigating the risk of overloaded teams and ensuring the effective utilization of talent across the organization. This means teams are able to work more efficiently, strengthen their morale, and increase their sprint velocity.
Making Data-Driven Decisions: Baseliner AI provides managers with actionable insights instead of data. The data will allow leaders to make better, proactive decisions about who should do what, timelines, or reprioritizing deliverables. Predicting behaviour limits costly mistakes and maximizes project value.
Baseliner AI in Real-World Use
Think about a large software project that engaged three or more dependent teams. With traditional estimation, recovering days of manual forecasting was common, and it was rarely accurate without overlooking a dependency to affect a delay.
The Baseliner AI provides:
Automatic analysis of historical performance of sprints.
Estimates that consider all dependencies and workloads.
Recommended warnings to potential risks before an effect of impact to your project schedules.
A more efficient allocation of tasks so that workloads are balanced.
Leading to on-time delivery, reduced costs, better utilization of the team's time, measurable ROI, less estimation time for teams, more visibility for the manager, and a more accurate timeline for the stakeholders.
Why Baseliner AI Stands Out
Even though plenty of project management tools powered by AI exist in the marketplace, Baseliner AI goes beyond AI project management tools available for multi-team Agile forecasting as it provides predictive capability unmatched by traditional tools. Baseliner AI combines historical data analysis with an AI-based recommendation system and optimization of resources to provide organizations that are using Baseliner, with measurably improved efficiency, reduced costs, and delivery certainty.
Simply put, Baseliner AI doesn't just forecast projects, it maximizes the return on every hour, resources, and budget spent, transforming planning from a potentially risky proposition to a strategic advantage.
Conclusion
It's evident that Baseliner AI generates a return on investment in project forecasting. Organizations save time, reduce costs, improve accuracy in delivery, increase team productivity, and discover actionable insights for better decision-making.
Baseliner AI facilitates the transition of ad-hoc project estimates that are manual (and errorprone) to a more reliable AI-automated and predictive process, enabling teams to deliver value faster, more confidently, and as such increase value added to an evolving project.
If you are an Agile team or enterprise looking to maximize efficiency while minimizing risk, Baseliner AI is a proven solution for intelligent project forecasting.
