Forecasting is required in many situations. Stocking an inventory may require forecasts of demand months in advance. Telecommunication routing requires traffic forecasts a few minutes ahead. Whatever the circumstances or time horizons involved, forecasting is an important aid in effective and efficient planning. This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and presents enough information about each method for readers to use them sensibly.

The Nine Principles of Agile Planning teaches CFOs, CAOs, CIOs, and Finance leaders the secret to building nimble and dynamic forecasts within their organizations. The Nine Principles blend real-world processes, people, and cloud tech to get your business forecasting the right way. By adopting the Nine Principles, you can create world-class forecasting that reacts to real-time changes in your business and reduces risk. You will be a forecasting hero! Too many CFOs and Finance teams fail their organizations with slow and cumbersome forecasting and budgeting cycles that have limited adoption beyond Finance. Management consultants, software vendors, and your stakeholders have ideas to fix—but you need something game-changing. The Nine Principles of Agile Planning are the game-changer you need! Investing in a new forecasting process will take money, people, and time, with a significant opportunity cost of not working on other things. This investment is no different from developing a new product, building a factory, or hiring staff. Any business investment like this must earn an ROI. The Nine Principles of Agile Planning is a framework to give you the greatest chance of success of achieving this ROI by building a forecasting process to provide real operational value that helps run the organization on a day-to-day basis. Learn the latest strategies from getting forecasting closer to your front line business teams, linking variable items to operational activity levels, planning by initiative, evaluating strategic big-bets, using modular planning, choosing a modern cloud planning tool, finding an expert, getting away from financial statement-centered forecasting, and using real-time IoT data to build operational early-warning systems. Make forecasting easy for your users by adopting the latest automation technologies and learn how you can automatically alert your planners when there is a trend that requires their attention. If you are evaluating cloud planning technologies from Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, OneStream, Oracle EPM (Hyperion), Planful, or SAP, the Nine Principles is the must-read guide to select the right tools, processes, and consultants to create agile and nimble planning in your organization. Use this chance to develop an Agile Planning philosophy that encourages rapid development of plans that can be quickly iterated, are easy to understand, and actionable. Take advantage of the golden age of cloud-based planning tools to facilitate these Agile Planning objectives. Create world-class budgeting and forecasting by adopting the Nine Principles! The Nine Principles of Agile Planning provides strategies to address issues like: - Lack of budgeting and forecasting adoption in your organization. - Forecasts that are slow to update and frequently wrong. - Decision-makers are ignoring Finance’s forecasts. - Forecasting is focused on Finance and not front-line business leaders. - Out-dated planning technology that is inflexible and hard to use for non-Finance users. - Treating all elements of your business equally during forecasting. - Planning using too much detail. - Using inefficient planning methodologies approaches. - Not using real-world initiatives to drive organizational change. - Failing to use real-world operational activity levels to inform financial forecasts. - Making the planning process too time-consuming and challenging. - Not integrating new real-time IoT data sources to build forecasting early-warning systems. - Failing to tailor planning to each operational function.

This pamphlet is an introduction to planning. It introduces you to the manner in which a planner approaches, analyzes and solves a problem. It begins with planning fundamentals, and proceeds step by step through a six step planning process. After the last step, some situations are identified in which planning can help you make decisions. A suggested list of sources for additional information completes the pamphlet.