give stakeholders a range, not a date you'll have to defend

you've given a date before that felt right in the room and looked wrong six weeks later. nobody lied. the estimates were reasonable. a single date is just what the tool asked for, and a single date can't hold how sure anyone was.

jollygig scheduling asks for the range instead, and does the arithmetic you'd never do by hand.

what you give it, and what you get back

for each activity you give three numbers in workdays: a best plausible case, a most likely case and a worst plausible case. you draw the dependencies on a canvas, or just move cards around a board. same activities either way.

back comes the whole spread of finish dates, with a p50, a p75 and a p95, and the chance of making any date you care about: "about a 70% chance of nov 14". the p50 is a fair guess for your own planning. the p95 is the one to think about before you promise someone outside the team. here's why we say a p50 is not a commitment.

the part most tools skip: things run long together

activities that share an owner, an unproven library or a vendor tend to run long together. a forecast that treats them as independent comes out too optimistic at the long end, which is exactly the end you care about.

so jollygig asks. for any two activities you tick what they share: the same person or small team, the same unknown, the same technical area, one estimate anchored on the other. you never type a correlation coefficient. we explain the effect in why independent estimates lie to you.

what drives the date

every activity shows how often it sat on the critical path and how much it moves the finish, in words rather than as a score. when the chance of your committed date drops under the level your team picked, the guidance panel offers a few options: add help or focus where the date is carried, with a quick check of what finishing a day sooner there would do, look for room to resequence or trim on the main path, or re-check an estimate that is both wide and influential. it proposes, it doesn't instruct, and it talks about activities, never about the person who owns one.

a forecast, not a scorecard

there is no per-person view, no accuracy score and no ranking, and there won't be. variance is a property of the work. an estimate that turned out wrong is information about the plan, not a mark against the person who gave it.

when the team is strained

if you also use team health, link a workspace to the team doing the work. when that team is showing signs of strain, jollygig offers to widen the pessimistic end of the estimates by 10%, because estimates made under strain tend to run optimistic. it's one click, you can undo it, and it never says who or why.

what it costs

scheduling is $49 a month billed annually ($59 monthly) for the whole organization, and covers up to ten workspaces. it's flat: adding people to a workspace doesn't change the price. with team health too, scheduling is 20% off. the 30-day trial needs no card. details are on the pricing page.

what it doesn't do yet

it isn't trying to replace your issue tracker. there's a board for the week's work, but there's no import from jira or anywhere else yet: you add activities by hand today, and a csv import is something we'd like to build. calendars are per workspace, with holidays and partial days, not per person. if one of those is the thing that decides it for you, write to help@jollygig.com and tell us.

see how scheduling works, or read the help section for the details.