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Understanding forecasts in Command

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Forecasts show when tickets and releases in Command are likely to be done. Command calculates them automatically from your team's ticket rank and how long your team's recent work has actually taken, so your team doesn't need to estimate individual tickets. Use forecasts to plan delivery, spot scheduling pressure early, and see how changes to priority or scope affect timing.

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Why Command forecasts dates automatically

Many teams plan by estimating each ticket up front, for example with story points, and adding those estimates up. Estimating takes time in every planning session, and individual estimates are often hard to get right, especially as coding agents take on more of the work and change how long tasks take.

Command takes a different approach. Instead of asking people to guess effort in advance, it uses how long your team's work has actually taken. That history already reflects how your team works in practice, including code reviews, interruptions, and handoffs. Your team spends less time estimating, and forecasts stay up to date as work moves, without anyone recalculating them.

This also changes what planning meetings are for. Instead of spending ceremonies sizing tickets and debating points, your team can focus on decisions: what to prioritize next, what to cut from a release, and how to unblock work that's taking longer than usual.

Forecasts aren't meant to be exact for every single ticket. They're most useful across a group of tickets, such as a cycle or a release, where they give engineering managers, product managers, and stakeholders a realistic view of when work is likely to land.

How Command calculates forecasts

Command uses a Monte Carlo simulation to forecast when work will be done. Instead of calculating a single date, it runs many possible versions of your team's upcoming work and uses the results to produce a range of likely completion dates. This is similar to how weather forecasts predict a range of likely outcomes rather than one exact result.

The simulation is based on three things:

  • Ticket rank. Your backlog is ranked, and Command works through it from the top down. A higher-ranked ticket is scheduled before lower-ranked work, so moving a ticket up generally moves its forecast earlier.
  • Historical cycle time. Rather than a fixed estimate per ticket, Command uses the range of times your team's tickets took to complete over the past three cycles.
  • Working days. The simulation skips non-working days, such as weekends, and treats the schedule as a continuous sequence of working days. Results are shown as calendar dates.

Forecasts are for planning, not commitments. They update automatically when ticket rank or your team's pace changes. Forecasts are generated by Command and can't be edited manually.

Read a forecast

Forecasts are shown as percentiles, written as P followed by a number. Each percentile tells you how likely it is that the work finishes by that date. For example, P85 means there's an 85% chance the ticket will be done by that date, based on your team's recent pace.

A higher percentile gives a later, more cautious date, because it covers more of the simulated outcomes. A lower percentile gives an earlier, more optimistic date.

To see the full range for a ticket:

  1. In the ranked ticket list, select the forecast on the ticket.
  2. Review the table that opens. It lists each percentile with its forecasted date.

When forecasts become available

Command needs enough completed work from your team before it can forecast dates:

  1. Complete your first tickets. Until your Teamspace has enough completed work, Command shows how many more tickets you need to complete, for example "Complete 10 more tickets to unlock predicted delivery dates."
  2. Gather data. After you reach that number, Command shows Gathering data until your team has completed three cycles.
  3. Use forecasts. After three cycles, forecasts appear on tickets and releases.

If your team's pace changes or work pauses, the range between percentiles may get wider while Command updates its baseline.

Forecasts for releases

A release's forecast is based on its linked tickets. Command uses the forecast of the last linked ticket in priority order, rather than adding separate time for the release itself.

You can set a target date on a release. Command compares it with the forecast and shows the likelihood of finishing on or before the target. Setting a target date doesn't change the forecast. Target dates are available for releases only, not individual tickets.

The release forecast changes when you reorder or complete linked tickets, or add or remove tickets from the release. Use it to compare planning scenarios and decide whether to adjust priority or scope, and review it regularly as your team's work changes.

 



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Understanding forecasts in Command | Asana Help Center