Baseline vs. Forecast Schedule with EVM

Hello Steve,
Quite complicated, what you want!
Are you surprised to see that deleting a task will also delete its baseline? In MSP, current schedule and its baselines are stored in the same file.
Use a specific baseline for your "locked away and separate" baseline, say the contract, and another one every time you want to save a picture of your project at a certain amount of completion
Alexandre

I don’t do easy questions. ;-) No I’m not surprised that MSP deletes the baseline. This is a symptom of MSP. I use a "locked away and separate" contract baseline but our EVM tool requires a rolling baseline to store changes to BCWS information. You could use the baseline information in the current schedule for this purpose, but it’s fragile and not easy to change resource rates of task baselines. A solution is to use a separate ’baseline schedule’ which should mirror the baseline in the ’current schedule’, but which is easier to control. This seems to work quite well, but carries a significant overhead, as you have to maintain an EVM baseline and a tracking baseline (for tracking Gantt’s etc). I was wondering which method of working is more popular and whether anyone has developed alternative workarounds to the issues discussed above.

Baseline means Baseline.
It doesn’t change.
It’s not supposed to.
There wouldn’t be any point in having it if it did change.
If you delete a Task, then that Task no longer exists, so of course its Baseline does not exist.
This is perfectly reasonable to me.

Steve,
I guess I would export values into MS Access or whatsoever database, in order to mimic P3’s "Store period performance" functionnality
Then I would be able to export these data into MS Excel to generate a graph
Or, create a MS Excel worksheet in which you will manually enter the desired data to generate the graph; I did so years ago to create a sophisticated graph from project data
Do not expect MS Project will do anything so wise for you!
Alexandre

Hey Trevor,
I want to come back to Aus and work in Shipbuilding....I love the idea of immovable baselines. Unfortunately with a 6000 line schedule our baselines have a habit of changing due to customer/supplier renegotiation, rolling wave planning, risk occurrence, organisational changes, labour rate changes etc. I guess you have similar issues, but less frequently?

Alexandre,
We already have an EVM tool to generate the graphs, it’s maintaining baseline integrity I’m really worried about.

Cheers...
Steve

That sounds like something similar I had faced a couple of years where I had to constantly change the schedule around while trying to monitor progress.

I came up with a solution with the approval of the project manager.
The idea of the baseline appealed to him so I explained to him that with the liklihood of the programme being changed around so much due to outside forces, I would use excel to monitor the changes to baseline in terms of work effort.
Ther first programme that was agreed, I imported the data to excel & set up the baseline no.1 in graph format.
Any changes to the schedule became the working programme so I was monitoring the working programme for progress.
With the baseline in the background, I exported work & actual work into excel to enable me to show the variance between the baseline, working programme & the actual progress in excel format with satisfactory EVM results & a very satisfield project manager!