Introduction: Microsoft Project 2010 Series: Keeping Your Project on Track by Leveraging the Baseline Features of Project 2010 (Session 7)
Good Afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Techgig webinar series, our endeavor to empower techies. We believe that sharing of the knowledge is the key to enhance our skills and grow us as professional with this principle in mind we have initiated a series of webinars conducted by industry experts to give you all a crisp insight of the various domains. The topic of today’s session is- Keeping Your Project on Track by Leveraging the Baseline Features of Project 2010. This is the 7th session in Microsoft Project 2010 series which is being conducted by Mr. B.Sai Prasad Senior Manager Learning and Development at Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt, Ltd. So, without further delay I introduce you all to our guest speaker over to Mr. Sai. So Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening to all participants who have joined this 7th Session of this project 2010 series. So, title of today’s webcast would be on keeping your project back on track by leveraging the baseline features of project 2010. So for those who are joining this webinar for the first time we have already completed six sessions and they have recorded videos of these sessions are available in Techgig. So let’s quickly look at the key takeaways of today’s session. First would start with how set an initial base line with respect to Microsoft project and how it is important in terms of updating it (( )) followed by we will move on to how to identify the impact of a change request as part of the schedule and cost and how to maintain different versions of baseline when we update a plan because of change request. So first let’s talk about facts no project as executed as per the plan so the plan what we initial prepare would be highly based on the past estimates and is budgetment. As you start executing the project as per your plan you might come across difficulties and you might need to replan some of your activities without affecting your project (( )) critical part. So executing the project is more challenging than the plan what you generally created. So thinking on the same line there are certain common mistakes that are made by the schedulers or the Microsoft project users. One of the most common mistakes is they don’t update the plan which means the plan is kept static because they assume the plan just reflects what is been approved by customers. Second mistake is they have more constraints and less dependency between the activities in a project which means whenever any of the initial activities planned gets delayed or gets completed ahead of your original estimates the other activities may not get adjusted accordingly which means that you have more constraints and less of dependencies. The third common mistake is the ideal update their actual which is percentage complete, how much work is pending but they don’t try to revise the estimate based on the new productivities aware of their team members. So these are the general common mistakes of schedulers in terms of using Microsoft project. But let’s now talk about how these mistakes are connected with the topic what we are discussing. If you closely observe the first mistake may be they keep the plan static which means that they don’t have baseline which means they don’t keep the plan up to date which means that they will not able to know where they stand with respect to a project execution.
Prepare for first Baseline
So let’s talk about how to set the first baseline with respect to a project. I am just moving back to my project 2010. So this is the sample plan which we will be using in today’s webcast. I remember on the third session of the series we talked about creating a work break down structure and we have talked about this attribute or the field called task mode. The task mode is ideally a new feature that was added in project 2010 that can take one of these two values it can be either auto scheduled or manually scheduled. When I say an activity is manually scheduled which means these users have complete control over the dates, the durations, the work which means Microsoft project will not try to calculate these by anyway. But when you say an activity is auto scheduled which means when we try to revise the duration or the effort or when the predecessor is getting affected naturally these dates will get recalculated. Now let’s take this example you can see there are a few set of activities which I have and you can see there are two different icons that are displayed on the task mode. The one that is having the arrow is the auto scheduled activities and the one that is having the board pin is manual the scheduled task. So now let’s the first activity which was estimated at 1 day now these revise to 2 days you would be able to find is that the research activity start and finish is not getting adjusted accordingly the reason is these activity is currently manually scheduled. So in order to fix this problem I just need to right click on and say respect the links. Now we can see somewhere on the bottom there is another manually scheduled task that is having the similar problem. So I may not be able to respect links every time when there is a conflict so what we prefer is when it comes to base lining it’s an approved version of your plan when I say an approved version of the plan. It is assumed that the start date is the finished date is realistic which means that they should not have any activities that are manually entered or none of this activity should be manually scheduled task. So the first step is let’s making sure that all these tasks are auto scheduled. I am just going to change it auto scheduled now you will be able to find all my tasks are auto scheduled and let’s quickly validate. You can just go to the view ribbon you can see there is a filter dropdown available on the filter I might be able to select which are auto scheduled and which are manually scheduled. So let me go to more filters you can find a filter called manually scheduled task let me say highlight you can see none of these activities are highlighted which means all these activities are auto scheduled so which means we are save to do base lining. The second question we might have is so what is the baseline first right? So when we say baseline people might say the data what I see on the screen is what I mean by baseline so why should I do base lining in project. If you observe the data or the work, duration start and finish as you start executing these project activities these values may change which means that there actual might be different than your estimates so a value that is changing or affecting the bases cannot be called as an approved version. So the first step we need to make we need to take a copy of this data and we need to save it in the same place so when you say we need to take a copy and save it it’s not that we should save it in a separate file we are just going to take a copy of these fields what was just highlighted into a another set of field in the same (( )) file. So the first step is we need to understand the view you are now looking at as you know the view is a Gantt chart view and currently the table we are now looking at within these view is a entry table you can just observe on my top left most corner the small tool tip read table entry view is Gantt chart. So the another way by which you can look at your current table is on your view ribbon go to that table option you get the entry selected so entry just reflects your current schedule which you plan as of your today so as you start executing the project the values in the entry table will go across multiple revision based on your progress. So when we talk about base lining as I have already mentioned we need to take a copy of these data save it in the same place so these data are going to be updated into the another set of field in the task table, resource table and the assignment table. But let’s first check whether the schedule is already base lined or not. So there are two ways of doing it people might either insert columns to expose the baseline data the second option I would prefer is you can just change the table from the entry table to the baseline table . So the baseline table will have set of columns that exposes the baseline data of the current MPP file so let me click on tables you can find the current table don’t have anything called baseline so I am going go to more tables you can see the other tables are supported in this current view so let me select baseline and say apply. Now you can see the same set of task appearing the view is still Gantt chart but the fields that are being displayed are totally different when your entering table the field names where work, duration, start and finish. If you look at your baseline table which are just highlighted you can see the column name read as baseline duration, baseline start, baseline finish, baseline work, baseline cost. So you can see these data are coming from the same MPP file and currently the values are not updated. So if I want to do the base linings in Microsoft project the first step which we need to make sure that all your activities are auto scheduled if not make sure that you try to do the check to the resource and the schedule optimization before you get the approval from the customer. Once the customer as approved the next immediate step you need to do is you need to ensure you take a copy of your data what your planned that has been approved by the customer into the baseline. So to do the base lining you just need to go to the project ribbon you see there is an option called set base line. So let me select set baseline so at any point in time in a project right? so might have only one baseline which is the recently approved one we call it as the latest baseline. In the set baseline dialogue box you can see there are two options one is called set baseline set in drim plan the second option is whether you want to say the baseline for a entire project or for the selected task . Let me (( )) selected task option later. But let’s talk about the first radio button called set baseline when we say set baseline we are trying to take a copy of your current plan which you saw in your entry table into the baseline fields of your three table’s task, recourses and assignments in Microsoft project you can have 11 versions of baseline so this might confuse most of us we might ask why should I have 11baseline if I need only one, very true. But in Microsoft project of these 11only one is active the remaining 10 are inactive baselines so active baseline is what we call as baseline and baseline 1 to baseline 10 is just used to store the old version of your baseline for example when you start your project you will have your baseline in baseline after a few weeks or after a few months when there is a approve change request and you incorporate the change request as your part of your plan may be due to some reason you might want to take a copy of your first baseline to save it somewhere else so that you can either compare it or you might want to cancel the current baseline and just go back to the previous baseline so baseline 1 to baseline 10 is been provided by Microsoft just to have backup of your old baseline. But remember baseline 1 to baseline 10 will not be used for reporting or status and performance it’s just used to (( )) just to hold your hold copies. So let’s do the first base line so I am just going to select baseline which is going to be my active baseline and I am going to do for my entire project so let me select entire project and say ok now you will be able to observe few changes that have happened on my screen so the baseline duration column gets updated the baseline start, baseline finish, baseline work and baseline cost. So as you can see when you do a baseline internally the task table, resource table and the assignments table the planned data is copied into the respective baseline fields. So you may now conclude that base lining is all about coping data from entry table to the base line table. This statement is not very much true the reason is base lining is not something to do with what you see on your screen rather its more happening at file level rather than at a view level. So let me give a small example to explain base lining in different terms and I am just going to change my view to the resource sheet on my resource sheet you can see there are three resources and this is what my planned data is. so now I can change my table from the entry table to my base table here so I am just going to change my table here to let’s say work now your able to see that for same set of resources I can see some baseline data there also which means the base lining is not about what data you see on the screen it is all about taking a copy of a current plan and storing it in the baseline related fields of the three tables. So I am just going to go back to my Gantt chart now we have just done our first baseline so now you look at your entry table now the entry tables data work, duration, start and finish and your baseline tables’ data will look alike. now please remember your baseline data though it looks editable by default I recommend that don’t edit this values the reason is when you try to revise the baseline duration from 2 days to 1 day or 2 days or 5days you might expect the finish date of your other activities or the start date of other activates to get adjusted remember it will not happen for baseline related fields the reason is the baseline fields are just copy of your data what you saw in your entry table. its only the fields that are there in the entry table which are calculated once which means when I try to revise the duration of my prepare from 2 days to 3 days you can see the other activities will get updated for the same will not happen for the baseline related fields. Now let me look at the right hand side you can see currently the bar starts with respect to the start date and the bar finishes at the finish date. You might want to look at the baseline data of these activities to (( )) data of these baseline activities either you can change the table to the baseline table or you can just right click on your chat, select the show or hide bar styles select baseline and you can see the 11 baselines will be listed here and were there will be a small label printed saying which baseline was updated which baseline is empty so I am just going to select baseline now you can see that below all these blue color bar you can see there is a small red color bar drawn just reference standing that these activities have been base lined in Microsoft project . So one of the most common mistakes I have seen done by schedulers is they don’t do a base lining they just use a entry table to just to reflect what as planned and we just updated the actual and the finish to record your actual or revise estimates. But remember there are two tables which you have seen today one is called as the entry table which you’re now looking on the screen the second is a baseline table which stores your baseline data. So remember your entry table will always be dynamic so as of now your entry table and your baseline table will look alike because we have not progressed in this project. So Microsoft project assumes that we are going to start as per your original date and we are going to finish as per you original dates so this is what are happening as of today ok. Now the second step which I just wanted to tell you with respect to base lining is whenever there is an approved change request comes in you might want to revise your estimates and you might want to incorporate without impacting the entire baseline. So I am now going to take two different scenarios now the first scenario is let’s look at we might want to add a new set of activities which might change the dependencies of the existing task. The second scenario is one of the existing activity is removed from your project which means we are trying to This scope the objectives. So let’s look at scenario one in scenario 1 we just said we are going to add a new set of activities to the project plan at the same time the new set of activities may or may not impact your critical path which means that the dependencies may also change. So first step what I am going to do his I am just going to go to my table and I am just going to show you these small table called tracking table because it could be quite useful for you to appreciate how these updating the baseline for the change request works. so I just change my table to tracking you can see that there are new set of fields that has been displayed. So you can see the actual start, actual finish percentage complete and the other fields related to actual but for a moment I just want you to focus only on actual start, actual finish percentage complete and the actual duration. So let’s say they prepare document task is 100% complete so I am just going to say this activity is 100% complete the moment I say the activity is 100% complete the actual start and the actual finish is automatically calculated and the project assumes that the remaining duration of the task is zero and the actual duration is same as your estimates for a moment let’s assume that this activity got completed but it took more than 2days lets say this activity took 3days to complete now the moment I say 3days you can see the actual duration gets revised you can see the actual finish date also getting pushed because of this 1day slip on my first activity naturally it might have some impact on the start date and the finish date of your other task. So now the next question I have is how do you I know the revised start date and finish date of your other activities? So if I just go to my baseline table, the baseline table will just have what has been promised to the customer it will not just talk about my revise start date or finish date of my other activities. so if I want to know the current estimates on the current start date and the finish date of my other task are you just need to change your table back into the entry table remember the entry table it’s also called as your current schedule so now you can see on your entry table because of the first activity got completed its duration got revised to 3days and finish date got revised because of the finish date the other activities also getting impact. So as you can ideally see based on you actual your entry table is always going to get adjusted accordingly and these is the power of your entry table so the entry table will not be static like your base lining. Now let’s take the first scenario in my first scenario let’s say that you have to add a new set of activities for example let’s say that after the approval activity you might want to have a final approval before you get into the design ok. So I am just going to go the task ribbon and I am just going to insert a new task ok so I am just going to change the color of this so that you know this a new task we have added and let’s say this activity currently manual scheduled so I am just going to make it auto scheduled so project assumes that this activity can start and the project start date and by default the project assumes these activity can completed in one day so its starts from Friday morning and completes on Friday evening but we know that this final approval can happen only after activity four so I am just going to say that predecessor is four and let’s say that the approval is going to be done by resources and let’s say the resource is (( )) fine so I have done the approval and if you closely observe the approval does not have any success ok. So I am just going to look at my relationship diagram on the bottom you can see after final approval I don’t have any other activity so what I am going to do is after final approval let’s say that we want to start the design activity so I am just going to link these 2 task. So as you can see here I have added new set of activities to your project plan ok now you might want to write and you have added this new activity very good but you can see that if you look at you baseline table. now let me turn off my relationship diagram you can see the final approval is not yet base lined because it’s a new task that has been added after doing a base lining so I am just going to go back to my entry table so if you just observe this that these is a new task that got added so the question what we might have is ok how do I baseline now. so there are two different task people might have people might say that I need to baseline the complete project, the second type of people might say I need to baseline the new task and the impacted activities. So let’s take the first part for those who say that we need a baseline for entire project please remember when you baseline the entire project it what happens is from prepare document to sign off all the work, duration, start and finish all these activities will get copied again into the baseline table which means that your baseline duration of your prepare document will now be 3days rather than 2days which means you lose your original estimates and secondly the slip pages that as happened because of that 1day slip will disappear automatically because when you baseline the entire project you might lose track of which activities start ahead which start activity got delay. So the first step what we need to do is before we start adding a new activity we need to take a copy of your base lining so I am just going to undo this changes what I have done. so the first step what I am going to do is I am just going to take a back up of my current baseline ok. So that lets say after doing a scenario if you change your mind we can always revert to a different baseline. So how do I take a back up of my current baseline go to the project ribbon go to the set baseline now you need to select the second radio button called set interim plan so as the name says it is not a baseline we are doing we are just trying to take a copy of a set of data into another set of fields in your same file. So I am just going to say copy baseline to baseline 1. so the purpose of we doing this is after getting an approval of change request if the customer changes his mind saying that lets can we go back to the first baseline we had 2 months before you can always say copy baseline 1 to baseline because your baseline1 will anyway have your old baseline. so I am just taking a copy of baseline 2 to baseline1 for the entire project you may not observe any changes in the screen because now your only looking at your entry table and those who are right side the black color bars are just baseline data and not the baseline1 data. The second step is we might want to include the change request now but remember before you add the change request you need to remember what is your current start date and the finish date of your activities. the reason is after adding the change request and changing dependencies you might see that there are certain activities that might get delayed because of this change request of the customer should be aware of that impacted activities. So the first step is I am just going to take a backup of my start finish into another set of fields so let me insert those 2 fields on your screen so that you can understand it. so the first field I am going to insert is start1, the second field I am going to insert is finish1as you can see these 2fields are custom fields these have been provided by Microsoft for us to store any kind of data. but we are going to use these two fields to just take a copy of your current start finish into start1 and finish 1today the copy you just need to go to the set baseline again, go to the set interim plan (( )) first radio button its says set interim plan copy scheduled start, finish so when you say schedule start, finish it represents the start finish space into start1 and finish1 which is the next set of columns I have inserted and I want to do it for the entire project so that I can compare it later. Now you can see that start would have been copied to start1 and finish would have been copied to finish1remember start1 and finish1 are not calculated fields which means if I try to revise my duration here or my work or if I adjust the start finish this will not have any impact on start1 and finish1now with this idea let me go ahead and insert a new activity and I am just going to say the new activity is auto scheduled and these activity let’s say that the predecessor of these activity is going to be approval and let’s say the successor of these activity is designed. So as you can see I have an activity final approval I have set my predecessors and successors and you can see to your right these activities being connected with its predecessor and successor. The second step is let’s say that after doing the final approval may be if we currently look at it there is a sign off activities currently 4, 7 I am just going to change approval to final approval. Here ok good so I have connected all my task and let me assign resource to these activities let me say 5 here and let’s say this activity will take around 3days to complete. So the moment I you 3days right? so naturally the finish date of these activities called impacted and you can see the successor activities that are linked to it there start date and also finish date getting revised now this is what the impact the new activities are created in your current plan so as you have already seen doing the base lining for the entire project for the approve change request will not work so you need to incrementally update your base lining so as you can see now the new set of activities have impacted row number 4, 5, 6 and 7 so it’s quite easy to visualize here without looking at start and finish just by the change highlighting color that these activities got impacted. But change request will not be so simple like this you might want to add let’s 5 to 10 different activities across different phases of your project because of an approve change request naturally your changes will be distributed (()) fine which activity called impacted because you need to share only those activities that got impacted to the customer for approval and review right?. So now I have done it so the job now we have is to compare start with start1 and finish with finish1. There are 2 ways of doing it either comparing it with human eyes or you can also create a custom filter. How do you create a filter in project 2010 go to the view ribbon you can see a filter drop down choose the option called new filter and let me give the new filter name called here intermediate task so when you say impacted task and I am trying to compare start1 with start so I will say start1 finish1 so start does not equal to start or finish1 does not equal to finish ok so I am trying to compare that this filter should highlight only those task where start1 is not same as start or finish1 is not same as finish let me save it I think I need to enter with bracket ok good now I have created this filter that filter will be listed on top you can see custom impacted task. So when I apply that filter only those activities that got impacted will be listed on your screen now our job is quite simple you just need to select only that task that has been listed by these filter and go to the project at baseline right?. So u might now ask that now I have 2 baselines. Baseline and baseline1 where should I update my 4 task remember the 4 task will ideally go to your current baseline which is your active baseline that is baseline and you should not go to the entire project here you should just go for your selected task. Once you have said selected task there is a small checkbox is enabled it says roll up baseline to all summary task or from sub tasks into selected summary task. To understand these two checkboxes detail I am cancelling this option and let me turn on the project summary task you can see that currently if I just look at mine baseline table you can see the overall baseline work is around 12 days ok. Now when you try to baseline those selected activities naturally the baseline duration of your project summary task should also get impacted but by default when you select those 4 tasks and when you say set baseline and you selected task without turning on this two option so what happens is only the selected task will get the baseline where as the summary task will not get recalculated. so it’s better that you turn on rollup basements to all summary task and I am saying ok. Now you will be able to observe that baseline duration, the baseline work of your project summary also getting revised and also that the 4 task that is called added in your project is also getting base lined. so let me remove this filter and let me change my table into the entry table. Now if you closely observe to your right it only activities and the activities follow that are getting base lines the activities that are before that are still having that one day slip pages in your project. So these how you need to take care of updating a baseline for approve change request. The second scenario which I was discussing was how do I remove an activity because of an approve change request so when you say remove right? So people think I need to delete it delete that row from Microsoft project. But let’s say take this example let’s say that design activity got removed from a project so what people try do is they go to the design and let me show you the baseline table, so they select design and they will just say delete but before I delete it before I press the delete button I just want you to observe the baseline duration, the total baseline work of this task. So when I remove the design the eight of should be subtracted from the baseline work and 3days if it was part of my critical part it should be subtracted from the project summary task. but let is what happens when you delete as you can see the task is removed but you can see it will not have rolled up automatically to its current. The second problem you have is you don’t have any traceability now let’s say after few months down the line when the customer is asking you or you might want to look at if we had an activity some think like this but that activity is now missing we don’t know what was the estimate we had at the beginning of the project actually those kind of questions cannot be answered now because you have done a hard delete it’s very difficult to recovery that task now. So what I recommend is don’t delete a row like this what you do in Microsoft excel rather do it in a very polished way. So I am just going back to my entry table, so on my entry table let’s say if I want remove my final approval I recommend don’t delete it may just color code that activity in different color first like final approval and say and you can just change the task name issue need. So the people who look at it know that this activity got deleted. The second think is when you say an activity is deleted naturally this task duration will be zero right? so I am just going to say it is zero so when you say the activity duration is zero which means that if you look at your baseline data of this particular task. it has still 24, which means we still need to have back up of my old data which I still have but I don’t lose my old data because now it still available if I take a copy of these current baseline to baseline1. The second step is once you have made that activity duration to zero you can see on your right the activity will automatically get converted to a milestone. But remember this activity is not milestone it is just that this activity got deleted and we said zero Microsoft project assumes that it is a milestone. So what I would recommend is just override this default symbol of this task. So just do mouse over on top of this diamond and just double click. Now just change the shape to something else and just change the color if you want so that people at least know that this not a milestone but a deleted activity. so the advantage now you having now is though the activity got deleted from your current baseline and still your baseline1 will have your data so when I say when I select the selected task when I apply the filter here you can see the deleted activity got removed when I place a filter called impacted activities so only this activity got impacted so I am just going to select project set baseline selected task role up to all baselines so let me change my table to entry table and let me reset the filter to no filters so as you can see I am not the hard delete right? So I just make sure that I reduce the duration or the work of this task to zero in order this to work. The second step after you have baseline the project or rebase line the project you might look at comparing baseline. So if you look at your current plan we have two baselines now one is baseline and one is baseline1. how do I compare both baselines so there are two ways of doing it you can either use a table approach or either you can use a chart approach. Let’s talk about chart approach first, the first step is you need to change you view so go to the view ribbon click on other views more views and select the view called multiple baseline Gantt. Remember this view will give meaningful information only if you have multiple baselines which have which means baseline 1, baseline 2 and so on so. let me select apply now your able to observe that towards the left you see the same entry table but towards your right you can see there are two lines drawn for every task the blue color line just represents the baseline and the red color line represents the baseline 1you can see because of the new change request right? These activities got impacted and this is the new task that got added as a part of your change request, but towards your right? if you want to look at the baseline data so if you want to look at you have a table for baseline so might want to look at baseline1 data on the other side so there is baseline1 table by default I recommend you to edit the baseline table or you take a copy of a baseline table just change the name of table to baseline1 and you can see towards your left there are few fielding’s being listed you can see their field names are baseline , baseline duration, baseline start, baseline finish you can just change it to baseline1 duration, baseline1 start, baselin1 finish, baseline1 work, baseline1 cost so as you can see I have just change the field names and let me change the titles. so let me select ok and have baseline1 and let me say apply now you can see in your baseline1the newly deleted activity is not part of your first baseline, but it was part of your current baseline. Now the last step is after your baseline you would have observed that base lining is all about taking a copy of your current plan into set of fields so after point in time you find all the 11 baselines are full so you might want to clear one those baselines how do I clear it so just go to the same set baseline option under project ribbon select the clear baseline option and choose what baseline you want to clear so in case if I want to clear baseline1 I select baseline1 here select it for entire project and I hit the ok button now you can see baseline1 table gets reset and towards your right you can see a red color line automatically disappears. So let’s quickly recap what we have seen ok so the first step is in order to do first base line and make sure that you switch all your task to auto scheduled and to view the base lining make sure that you change your tables to the baseline tables to do your first baseline go to project tab choose the set base line option and as you know there are 11 baseline in this project but add to baseline and baseline1 to baseline10 is used to store only the old version of your baseline.