Best Practices on re-baselining/summary tasks/EV from Project 2000

  • Thread starter melissa.pershing
  • Start date
M

melissa.pershing

My group has struggled with re-baselining a project (tasks) ever since
I've been here. We're moving to 2003 soon which should help alleviate
some of our problems. Here's a quick scenario.

IT Software Development Project

During Development we had an approved change and the simplified
summary task structure is as such

Initation (complete)
Planning (complete)
Execution
-Development (in progress) BLWrk (858) Wrk (799)
---Task 1 BLWrk (355) Wrk (342)
---Task 2 BLWrk (143) Wrk (181)
---Task 3 BLWrk (360) Wrk (225)
---Task 4 *new task* BLWrk (52) Wrk (52)
Closing

So I baselined Task 4 and all sub-sequent tasks. Then I need to
rebaseline Dev, Execution, and Task 0, correct? However, I would
expect BL Work on Development should just add in the addt'l 52 hours -
making it (910), but it doesn't, instead it copies Wrk (799) into
BLWrk. I've read on why this happens, but I'm not sure it produces
the right reporting results.

I'm more concerned with getting the proper EV information out of the
project after making this approved change. I have been talking myself
into a circle for about 2 hours on this now, but I'm admittedly weak
in the EV arena.

My entire PMO team would appreciate any insight into this frustrating
problem!

Melissa Pershing, PMP
 
J

Jim Aksel

Hello Melisa - When baselining a few tasks, you do not need to re-baseline
all the roll-ups. Instead, when you set the baseline for the new work for
selected tasks, select the options to roll up the basline to all summary
tasks (both options can be checked).

I believe this was available in versions prior to 2003, I do not recall.
Certainly 2003 has this feature. If not, yes, you need to rebaseline all the
appropriate summaries.
 
M

Melissa

Hello Melisa - When baselining a few tasks, you do not need to re-baseline
all the roll-ups. Instead, when you set the baseline for the new work for
selected tasks, select the options to roll up the basline to all summary
tasks (both options can be checked).

I believe this was available in versions prior to 2003, I do not recall.
Certainly 2003 has this feature. If not, yes, you need to rebaseline all the
appropriate summaries.












- Show quoted text -
Click to expand...

Yea, 2000 does not have the expanded option window for saving a
baseline like versions 2003 and up. It'd be nice for sure. What
effect then does your suggestion have on the EV calculations? Will
they all recalculate properly? I think our group got on the
discussion that when looking at the summary vs. the detail tasks then
moving forward it won't 'add up' and therefore reports pulled from the
EV table might be misleading. am I making sense?
 
J

Jim Aksel

Since I no longer have a Project2000 install, my gut check tells me that it
is all going to roll up .... you do not have the option to do only the one
task so it will be re-baselining all of it. You can try it yourself-create a
new Project1.mpp and create a few tasks with endentures. Baseline the whole
project.

Then, go back and change one of the indentured tasks and rebaseline that one
task. Watch what rolls up.

This can be scary because if you rebaseline an in progress task, you are
going to be setting BCWS=BCWP<<===ACWP (everything will go to your actuals).
My advice would be to memorialize all your %Completes, Actual Starts and
Actual Finishes into some spare text columns. If you are inputting Actual
Costs manually, they will need to be stored as well. Then 0% all your
progress, then baseline. After that, come back with a paste for your start
dates, then %Complete, then Finish Dates.

What concerns me is that if you are manually enterring Actual Costs and are
carrying a high value of BCWP (CPI>1), you will loose those benefits when you
rebaseline with the data in place because your BCWP will be replaced by ACWP.
Likewise, if you are running a poor CPI, this poor performance will be
forgiven. So, to protect your data, you can do it the way I described. Play
with it in a Project1.mpp simple file to see what I mean.
 
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