Michael Gilliland is a longtime business forecasting practitioner and formerly a Product Marketing Manager for SAS Forecasting. He is on the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Forecasters, and is Associate Editor of their practitioner journal Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. Mike is author of The Business Forecasting Deal (Wiley, 2010) and former editor of the free e-book Forecasting with SAS: Special Collection (SAS Press, 2020). He is principal editor of Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions (Wiley, 2015) and Business Forecasting: The Emerging Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Wiley, 2021). In 2017 Mike received the Institute of Business Forecasting's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2021 his paper "FVA: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices" was inducted into the Foresight Hall of Fame. Mike initiated The Business Forecasting Deal blog in 2009 to help expose the seamy underbelly of forecasting practice, and to provide practical solutions to its most vexing problems.
This week I received an urgent text message from a good friend and former colleague in the consulting business: Mike, I am down 24 pages in your book and [besmirching my trousers]. Is there no hope for consultants like me? My response was to not let the book ruin a
An alarming percentage of major software implementations fail to be delivered on time, on budget, or even at all. Implementations of new forecasting software, or of new forecasting processes, are not immune from this legacy of failure. Why does this happen, and is there anything we can do about it?
There is a long running debate among forecasting professionals, on whether to use Forecast or Actual in the denominator of your percentage error calculations. The Winter 2009 issue of Foresight had an article by Kesten Green and Len Tashman, reporting on a survey (of the International Institute of Forecasters discussion
