Saving a Project Baseline
After developing a project plan, one of a project manager’s most
important activities is to record actuals and evaluate project
performance. To judge project performance properly, it is helpful to
compare it with your original plan. This original plan is called the
baseline plan, or just the baseline. A baseline is a collection of
important values in a project plan such as the planned start dates,
finish dates, and costs of the tasks, resources, and assignments. When
you save a baseline, Project takes a “snapshot” of the existing values
and saves it in your Project plan for future comparison.
The specific values saved in a baseline include the
task, resource, and assignment fields, as well as the timephased
fields.
Tip
Timephased fields show task, resource, and
assignment values distributed over time. For example, you can look
at a task with five days of work planned at the weekly, daily, or
hourly level and see the specific baseline work values per time
increment.
You should save the baseline when
-
You have developed the project plan as fully as possible.
(However, this does not mean that you cannot add tasks, resources,
or assignments to the project after work has started, for this is
often unavoidable.) -
You have not yet started entering actual values, such as a
task’s percentage of completion.
Project supports not just 1 but up to 11 baselines in a single
plan. The first one is called Baseline, and the rest are Baseline 1
through Baseline 10. Saving multiple baselines can be useful for
projects with especially long planning phases in which you might want
to compare different sets of baseline values. For example, you might
want to save and compare the baseline plans every month as the
planning details change. Or, you might want to save a new baseline at
various points during the execution of the project plan. You could,
for example, save the Baseline before work starts, then Baseline 1 a
month after work starts, Baseline 2 two months after work starts, and
so on. You can then view the various baselines and compare them to the
actual schedule throughout the project’s duration.
Tip
Saving several baselines in a project plan can increase your
file size.
In this exercise, you save the baseline for a project plan and
then view the baseline task values.
Set Up
Start Project if it’s not already running.
-
On the File tab, click
Save As.
Project displays the Save As dialog box. -
In the File name box,
type Simple Tracking, and then
click Save. -
On the Project tab, in
the Schedule group, click
Set Baseline, and then click
Set Baseline.
The Set Baseline dialog box appears.
You’ll set the baseline for the entire project by using the
default settings of the dialog box. -
Click OK.
Project saves the baseline, even though there’s no
indication in the Gantt Chart view that anything has changed. You
will now see some of the changes caused by saving the
baseline. -
On the View tab, in the
Task Views group, click
Other Views and then click
Task Sheet.
The Task Sheet view appears. Because this is a tabular view,
it does not include the Gantt chart, so more room is available to
see the fields in the table.
Now you’ll switch to the Variance table in the Task Sheet
view. The Variance table is one of several predefined tables that
include baseline values. -
On the View tab,
in the Data group, click
Tables.
In the listed tables, note the check mark next to Entry.
This means that the Entry table is currently displayed in the Task
Sheet view. You’ll switch to another table next. -
Click Variance.
Tip
You also can right-click the Select All button in the upper-left
corner of the active table to switch to a different
table.
The Variance table appears. This table includes both the
scheduled and baseline start and finish columns, shown side by
side for easy comparison.
Because no actual work has occurred yet and no changes to
the scheduled work have been made, the values in the Start and
Baseline Start fields are identical, as are the values in the
Finish and Baseline Finish fields. After actual work is recorded
or later schedule adjustments are made, the scheduled start and
finish values might differ from the baseline values. You would
then see the differences displayed in the variance columns. -
On the View tab, in the
Task Views group, click
Gantt Chart.
The Gantt Chart view appears.
Tip
Project includes views that compare the current
schedule to baseline, but here’s one quick way to see baseline
values in the Gantt Chart view: on the Format tab, in the Bar
Styles group, click Baseline and then click the baseline
(Baseline or Baseline1 through Baseline10) that you want to
display. Project draws baseline Gantt bars for the baseline you
choose.
Now that you’ve had a look at some baseline fields, it is
time to enter some actuals!
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