Baseline Cost and BCWS not rolled up to summary level

[Bob Cutler]

An observation: Baseline Cost and BCWS don't roll up to the summary level
after changes are made at the task level and re-baselined. Interestingly,
Actual Cost and ACWP do roll up properly. This is true on Project 2000,
2003, and 2007. Here's how to reproduce this quirk.
# Create a new project with a start date of February 1, 2007
# Create a summary task with two Fixed Work subsidiary tasks - 2 days
duration each
# Create a resource with a standard rate of $1/hr
# Assign the resource to both subsidiary tasks
# Baseline the entire project
# Note that the Baseline Cost and BCWS roll up properly
# Change the Work of the first subsidiary task to 32 hours, which increases
the duration to 4 days
# Select the first subsidiary task, and re-baseline it using the "Selected
Tasks" option
# Note that the Baseline Cost and BCWS no longer roll up properly
# Set the first subsidiary task to 50% complete and the second subsidiary
task to 100% complete
# Note that based on the numbers at the summary level, the SPI (BCWP/BCWS)
is $32/$32 or 1.00 indicating that all the work scheduled to date has been
completed. By contrast, totaling the subsidiary values yields an SPI of 0.67
($32/$48) indicating only 2/3 of the re-scheduled work is done, which is
correct.

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[Jack Dahlgren]

Did you make sure that the option to "roll up baselines" is set correctly?

-Jack Dahlgren

 

[Bob Cutler]

Note that BCWP rolls up automatically without using "roll up baselines", but
BCWS and Baseline Cost do not.

There are significant usability issues with "roll up baselines" as far as
I'm concerned. First you must baseline the revised tasks. Then you must
select each of the summary tasks that the tasks roll up to and go through the
baselining dialog again.

Anyway, there isn't any consistency between how the various baseline-related
fields roll up. Seems like baseline rollup should be a project-specific
option and should be performed automatically (and not depend on a human's
ability to correctly identify each and every summary task that a re-baselined
task rolls up to).