Best Practices for working with baselines

[Shane]

Hello MSPS Community,

Do anyone know any good literature surrounding best practices for using
baselines within Project Server.

This would be really helpful

Regards,
Shane

 

[Rod Gill]

Best practice is what ever supports the project management methodology your
organization uses and its reporting needs. The only real Best Practice is to
use at least one of them!

--

Rod Gill
Microsoft MVP for Project

Author of the only book on Project VBA, see:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

Hello MSPS Community,

Do anyone know any good literature surrounding best practices for using
baselines within Project Server.

This would be really helpful

Regards,
Shane

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[Marc Soester [MVP]]

Shane, technically speaking you will anways need to make sure that the
baseline ( without any number, so no Baseline1, Baseline2 etc) is your
current baseline since variances are calculated against the baseline (not
baseline1,2,3....).

You generally baseline after Project approval, since this determines your
buget and time commitment. You generally re-baseline if you have a scope
change within your project. Let's not forget why we have a baseline. A
baseline is our benchmark that we compare against when we track your
progress. It is therefore important to always ensure that the baseline is
what we want to compare it with.

If you need to re-baseline, you will need to copy your Baseline into your
Baseline1 ( or subsequent Baselines if you already have used Baseline1).
After you copied your baseline, you are able to rebaseline and overwrite your
origninal Baseline. This way you ensure that you have a history of your
baselines. Please note, MS project only has a total of 11 baselines.

In a Nutshell that is generally why and how you baseline. As Rod quite
rightly suggested, baselining depends on your process and not so much how it
is technically realised.
I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any additioanl questions.

 

[Christine Flora]

Hi Shane.

As others have stated, the "Best Practice" really depends on your company's
processes and how it determines that a project is "approved" and/or
rebaselined.

In my classes and to my clients I always recommend that they use one of the
other baselines (1-10) in addition to baseline 0 when saving the baseline.
What I mean by this is that certainly save the current baseline in Baseline 0
because all the tracking views use these fields for comparison, but also save
the baseline in one of the other Baselines for future reporting. For
example, the first time you baseline, save to both Baseline 0 and Baseline 1.
If you have to rebaseline based on the criteria your PMO/company has setup
for reasons/insighting incidents that would cause of rebaseline, because of a
scope change for example, then save the new baseline to Baseline 0 again
overwriting the orignal AND also Baseline2. This way I can report on
variances to the CURRENT baseline without having to change all the tracking
views AND ALSO be able to compare to the original baseline (baseline 1) if I
want. I have a view then that uses not only the Baseline 0 for comparision
but these original values from Baseline 1 as well.


I hope this helps.

Christine

Christine Flora,
CAPM, MCT, MCITP, MCTS, MCBMSP