Forecast Diagnostic

Investigate a forecast that missed, or that nobody trusts, and name the root cause with evidence. A forecast call asks "what's the number?" This diagnostic asks "was the number ever real?"

Practitioners converge on the view that most misses are inspection failures, not market failures: the evidence that a committed deal was fiction usually existed in the record before the miss.

Scope boundary, stated up front: this skill consumes whatever forecasting methodology already exists - the category set, roll-up rules, commit criteria, and coverage targets are inputs, not deliverables. Designing or redesigning that methodology is out of scope. When the investigation shows the methodology itself is undefined or ambiguous ("commit means different things to different reps"), report that as a finding and stop at the boundary.

Every confirmed root cause lands in exactly one of three classes, because each class has a different owner and a different fix:

• Data: the record was wrong, a human knew better.
• Behavior: the record faithfully reflects a biased human call.
• Demand: honest, evidenced pipeline still fell short.

The most common diagnostic error is issuing a behavior verdict for a data problem.

Interview

Ask before analyzing: