BASELINE VS ADDITIONAL TASKS
In the Open Standard
Julian CoetzeeMember for 20 years 4 months
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Good Day
I am experiencing a interesting situation, I draw up a plan or programme and once it is approved and signed off, I save the baseline and show it on the Gantt bar section so that one can see Planned vs Actual graphically.
What is the correct way to manage the programme if during the course of the project, additional tasks crop up and need to be added, as they might influence the critical path. If I add them in later, that menans they are not part of the original baseline and appear as blanks. Do I then select these "new" tasks and save the baseline again? I don’t want the original baseline finish to shift.
I hope what I am asking makes sense?
I am experiencing a interesting situation, I draw up a plan or programme and once it is approved and signed off, I save the baseline and show it on the Gantt bar section so that one can see Planned vs Actual graphically.
What is the correct way to manage the programme if during the course of the project, additional tasks crop up and need to be added, as they might influence the critical path. If I add them in later, that menans they are not part of the original baseline and appear as blanks. Do I then select these "new" tasks and save the baseline again? I don’t want the original baseline finish to shift.
I hope what I am asking makes sense?
10 replies
Oldest first- 0Alexandre Faulx-Briole ·Julian,
You are perfectly right, you should not re-save the original baseline; instead, save another baseline to reflect the project as being completed with the new tasks.
Be aware that MS project will only compute the variance between Current and Original Baseline.
Cheers - 0James Griffiths ·Julian,
The problem that you will encounter is that, when you add new activities, they might affect activities that were previously on the critical path. Strictly speaking, therefore, all previous activities that have been affected by the introduction of the new activities need to be re-baselined. Whether your client will allow this is another matter.
If the new activities are stand-alone, and do not affect any previous activities, then you are quite right to select the new activities and save them with a baseline.
James. - 0Tony McClennon ·Julian,
A workround may be to copy the baseline start and finish dates into another of the start/finish fields and rename the fields Baseline 1 Start/Finish (or include the baseline date).
Then the schedule could be rebaselined to include the new tasks, but you always have the original dates to refer back to.
If necessary, you could set up a view which has the Gantt chart area bars formatted with the current dates and the "baseline" being start1/finish1 dates rather than the MSP baseline dates.
Hope this is clear!!!
Tony - 0Vinod Raturi ·
Hi ,
i have never used interim plans before , can someone explain me the specifics as to how to go about it.
I copied my baselines plan to Start1 and finsh 1 fields. then i inserted start2 and finish 2 column in sheet view. It was here i got stuck as 1) after entering new date in start 2 column , i automatically didnt get finish 2 date ( depending on task duration) & I didnt notice new bar ( as i was expecting it ) was missing from the view.
i know , i am doing something fundamentally wrong , but would be grateful if someone could explain stepwise procedure for it.
thanks,
regards,
vinod - 0Tony McClennon ·Hi Vinod,
You probably need to show the default Start and Finish dates rather than Start2/Finish 2.
The idea of copying the dates is a a reference date only, and I suspect that MSP will not allow you to use the Start2/Finish2 fields to update the task start dates.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Tony - 0Vinod Raturi ·Hi Tony ,
Thanks for trying but honestly it didnt help .May be i phrased my question in wrong way.
What i want to achieve is A) I want to make 3 ( I assume MSP allows 11 ) base line plans for a particular project in Particular sequence and B) Then I want to make 3 baselines for same project but with different sequence of activities.
Is it possible i can view all my six plans together ?
I want to do this as in fabrication activity there are many activities we can do in parallel and in more than one sequence.
Thanks ,
regards. - 0Julian Coetzee ·Hello there
What you can do is save the original baseline, show it graphically by editing you bar styles. Change the sequence accordingly in the start and finish columns, save that as Baseline 1, show that graphically by adding it to your bar styles and do the same for the 3rd scenario.
Maybe that will work, I have not tried it myself yet. See what happens and let us know.
Cheers
Julian - 0Ioannis Leontiou ·Good day to you all
Adding activities to a plan which has already saved with a baseline; is a simple contractual question.
Are these activities part of your initial undertaking as per your contract? (I mean, have these activities left out by you. If this is true, YES they should be included in the initial baseline. To do this add these to your baseline, DO NOT save a new baseline for all activities.
Otherwise, they should be considered as changes to the contract and hence they are not part of your contractual obligations (Initial Baseline).
Thanks
I. Leontiou
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