Randy --
When new tasks are added to a project that has already been baselined, then
your company's change control methodologies should govern if and how the
project should be rebaselined. If your company has no established
procedures for how to reflect new tasks via change control in a project,
then there are several options:
One option is to rebaseline the entire project, which will eliminate all
variance in the project and give the project manager a "fresh start" from
today. Most will find this an unacceptable practice, as all of the
historical data is lost in the rebaselining process.
Another option is to baseline only the selected tasks, which is what your
project manager did. When baselining new tasks added to the project, the
project manager needs to make a decision about how the baseline values will
be handled for summary tasks. Your project manager opted to roll up the
baseline to all summary tasks. There is nothing wrong with this approach,
as doing so will eliminate the variance that is caused solely by the
presence of the new tasks. On the other hand, if the project manager opts
not to roll up the baseline values to any summary tasks, then the project
will show variance caused by the addition of the new tasks. Either case is
probably acceptable, depending on the reporting requirements of your
executives and potentially your customers.
Alas, there is no way to "roll back" the baseline values to their original
values before the PM rebaselined the project. Hope this explanation helps.
--
Dale A. Howard [MVP]
Enterprise Project Trainer/Consultant
Denver, Colorado
http://www.msprojectexperts.com
"We wrote the book on Project Server"
Randy said:
I have a user that since baselining a project has added several new tasks.
She then went into Save Baseline and For: chose Selected Tasks and To All
Summary Tasks thinking this would only update the subtasks and not the
entire project. The question is can she manually change the baseline back
to it's original state? Also, what should be done going forward whenever
adding new tasks? Baselining is new to me and it seems there are many
different ways to approach it.
