Video: Purpose of Interim Plan; Setting, Saving and Clearing a Baseline
Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. So far on the course we’ve
been concentrating on scheduling, looking at the use of resources to get the work on our house build done, and also setting up dependencies, deadlines, constraints, and so on. But there comes a point when the scheduling is all done. We’re confident in our schedule, or at least as confident as we can be, and now is the time to start looking at running the project and monitoring progress and the project progresses. That’s really what we’re going to start looking at in the next few sections. The first thing we’re going to do in this section is to look at saving a baseline.
Now let me, first of all, explain what a baseline is. If you were working on a relatively straightforward project, once you’ve got the scheduling done, you would save a baseline which is basically a copy of the schedule at a point in time. But it doesn’t only contain a copy of the schedule in terms of the dates for each of the tasks. A baseline also contains information about costs, about the use of resources, and so on, and we use a baseline to measure progress on the project.
So let’s suppose that we saved a snapshot of our building project on the day that the first person arrived to start work. Two or three weeks later we might look at comparing where we’d actually got to with that baseline. On the basis of that comparison, we can say whether things are going well or whether things are going badly. We could look at things like have we spent more or less money than we thought we would? Do we need more resources? And so on. Apart from the day to day practicality of comparing progress against a baseline, baselines are very often used for management reporting. So if you’re in a situation where you’re reporting progress on your project or projects to some kind of interested party, stake holders, management team, a board, or whoever, then it will very often be the case that you’ll be comparing how things actually are with a baseline. So the baseline really is the sort of benchmark that the projects progress is measured against.
So let’s consider our little building project here, that we’re going to build this house. Let’s suppose that we’ve saved a baseline, something we’ll be doing shortly. And let’s suppose that not long after we start the project somebody comes along and says, Okay we’ve changed our
minds about this build. We’re actually going to build a much bigger house. We’ve decided that we’re aiming for a different market altogether so we’re going to make the house 50% bigger. We’re going to have twice as many rooms. We’re going to have a triple garage. We’re going to do all sorts of things we weren’t going to do before. Immediately the schedule for building the house is very likely to be extended and the cost of building the house may be greatly increased. If we were then to continue to measure progress against our original baseline, it would really be unfair on the project manager because everything would be costing more, everything would be taking longer. Compared to the original baseline, we’d appear to be doing really badly. So in fact, you can have more than one baseline on a project. In fact, Project 2013 will accommodate up to 11 baselines. You probably won’t get involved in projects that need that many baselines and I should point out that it’s not good practice to sort of save a new baseline every week to make things look good. Usually a baseline is associated with some sort of commercial or contractual state. So if in the example I’ve just outlined it was decided to change the specification of the house and make it a much bigger building job, then we would formally adopt a new baseline once we’d rescheduled the build and redone the costings and so on. Now on this course, we’re just going to work with a single baseline for this build but it’s important to understand that you may well be in situations where you need to save new or additional baselines.
Something else that sometimes happens on projects is that you get a delay due to some external factor such as an industrial dispute. In fact, there was a good example in the U.K. just literally in the last two or three weeks before me recording this where one of the major public building projects has been delayed by the discovery of a colony of a rare species of spider. While they were doing the excavations, they discovered these spiders and the various scientists are now working out how to relocate these rare spiders somewhere else. The whole projects been delayed by some considerable length of time, and when this happens you wouldn’t necessarily save a new baseline, particularly if a delay only affected part of a project. What can happen is that you can put in place an alternative entity called an Interim plan. An interim plan is a sort of smaller scale thing than a baseline. An interim plan is basically just the dates rather than the overall costs and so on. And what you may do in some situations, let’s suppose you’ve got a baseline for a major project and you always want to keep site of that baseline. You always need to know how costs compare with how you originally envisaged them, how timescales are going, and so
on. But you also need on a day to day basis to see how things are going against a sort of revised schedule, perhaps something caused as I say by some exceptional event. What you can do in that situation is you can save an interim plan which is a sort of a low fat baseline and then you can compare progress with the interim plan for all or part of the project. Now we’re not going to cover interim plans on this course but it’s important to understand what the purpose of an interim plan is.
So here is a version of our current schedule. What I’m going to do is to save this as a baseline. Now in order to do that or to demonstrate, what happens when I do that on the View tab, click on Tables, go down to More tables, and we’re going to look at the baseline table. Now when we save a baseline what we get is a set of baseline figures. These include baseline duration, baseline start, baseline finish, baseline work, and baseline cost. Now before we save a baseline as you can see they’re all empty or zero.
So let’s save a baseline. Click on the Project tab. One of the options on the Project tab in the Schedule Group here is Set baseline. Note the screen tip there. Take a snapshot of your schedule that includes information about tasks, resources, and assignments. Let’s just click on the bottom of the button there. Set baseline. Notice there’s an option here to clear a baseline. You can actually, if you’ve made a mistake or you’ve decided it’s all gone horribly wrong, clear a baseline and start again. But let’s go on, Set baseline.
So we see the Set Baseline dialog and, first of all, we have an option between setting a baseline and setting an interim plan. Now we’re going to set a baseline and we can choose the baseline we want to set. There’s baseline which is the default baseline. That’s the one we’re going to use, and then as I said there’s a total of 11. There are ten alternative baselines. So if because of some major change in scope, budget, or whatever we needed to set a new baseline and we wanted to keep the original, then we’ve got up to ten alternative baselines. We’re going to stick with the default baseline here, and then we get a choice. Do you want a baseline for the whole project or for selected tasks? Now we’re going to work with the entire project on this occasion. So we’re going to say I want my default baseline for the entire project and then click on OK. Now when you do that all of the current figures are copied into those baseline fields that were empty before and we now have our project baseline.
And just to take one particular example, if you look at the project summary task here, that’s the task with ID zero at the top. The baseline amount of work is 696 hours and one of the things we can compare throughout the project is how we’re doing towards that total of 696 hours of work. Now there’s just one other thing I’d like to show you in relation to this and that is let’s suppose that we find we have an additional task and we’ve got approval to add it to the baseline. We don’t need to treat this as a change of scope or a completely new baseline. We just think it’s an omission and it’s one small item we can add to the current baseline. So let me just go back into the normal Gantt Chart View and I’m going to change back normally to the entry table. I’m going to put a task in prepare site, a new subtask right at the bottom there. So insert task. Let’s say it’s just a cleanup task and let’s say it’s a one day task, and resource wise, assign resource. I’m going to choose a work resource of laborer. Laborer’s going to have a cleanup task up there. Close. So there’s my new task. I’m going to add a dependence there. So let’s put in a link there. My project by the way is going to run late now because of that but that doesn’t matter at the moment. Now let’s go and look again at the baseline.
We’ve added this task since we saved the baseline so it’s not included in it, but we can add individual tasks to an existing baseline. So back on the Project tab, click on Set baseline again. Now we’re doing set baseline for selected task or tasks. If I select the summary tasks that I want to roll the figures into such as the prepare site task here which I haven’t selected, then what Project 2013 will do will be to recalculate totals for the summary task. But I can say to all summary tasks and that makes sure that all of the rolling up right up to the project summary task level is done. So now watch what happens when I click on OK. I’m warned about changing the existing baseline. It may not be my intention to add this to existing baseline. So that’s Project 2013 just warning me that I’m about to change the baseline I’ve already saved. Click on Yes and, of course, not only does the cleanup task now appear as part of the baseline, but the additional eight hours of work is in prepare site and the additional eight hours of work has been rolled up right to the top level to the project summary task as well. So it’s important to understand that you effectively manually control the rolling up of the additional work and cost and so on into summary tasks right up to the project summary task level.
So that’s how you add one or more tasks to an existing baseline and as we saw on the Set baseline button before, if you need to clear a baseline, there’s a button to do that as well.
So now there’s a pretty straightforward exercise for you to do. I’m going to take that newly added task out of this project and remove the baseline that I’ve already saved here, and then that is going to be example_13 in the files that you got with the course. All I’d like you to do is to save a baseline for example_13. My answer to that is example_14.