Preserving baseline

[K Major]

I have baselined my project and we are in the middle of implementing the
plan. We are focused on learning from any of our mistakes along the way, and
one of the tools we plan to use will be our baseline as it relates to judging
the accuracy of our estimates, etc.

2 questions in light of the above:

1) What is the general wisdom on deleting un-needed tasks (i.e we thought we
needed them, but we don't)? If I delete them, do I lose anything of value
with regard to the baseline?

2) What if there is a resource assigned to a task that didn't need to be -
just delete them? Or mark their work as zero hours? Point being is that
deleting them may not give us the proper perspective down the road when we
say "gosh, we estimated a lot of hours for this task, wonder why" (when the
answer is that we deleted resources that were iunncessary that made up some
of hours we estimated).

Sorry, for the somewhat "philosophical" questions...

Thanks, Kevin

 

[Rod Gill]

Firstly Project 2002+ is invaluable here: It has an extra 10 baselines. I
recommend using them by:

When schedule is first created and shared, save to Baseline1
When schedule is refined for second phase save to Baseline2
When schedule is refined for third save to Baseline3 and so on.

For time critical projects save to Baseline every week so progress trend can
be tracked.

Save a copy of the schedule with your weekly report
If you have two or more schedules making up the main project or program of
projects:
Record a simple macro of you consolidating all files into a master (No link
so all tasks are a copy). Save the consolidation weekly.

Now you can delete unwanted tasks and resources as you have an audit trail.