Query re re-baselining costs

[Jon Baldan]

We have an existing project which has been baselined with some costs.
Actuals have been recorded against this project previously. This
project spans a financial year boundary and new costs for the
resources have been published for the new financial year. We want to
re-baseline with these new costs but without adjusting the original
duration (i.e. work out how much extra the project would cost based on
the original duration and hours, not the current hours adjusted by the
actuals being recorded). Note that we require to leave our cost per
hour the same before the financial year boundary and only update it
for the hours baselined for after the financial year boundary.

We would appreciate any input from people who have had similar issues.
We would imagine that Professional Services firms would go through
this on at least a yearly basis.

Thanks in advance

 

[Rod Gill]

Hi,

Double-click a resource in the Resource Sheet,

Select the Costs tab. You can now select a new rate to be applied from a
specified date.

Project 2002 and 2003 have 11 baselines, so I would copy the original
Baseline to Baseline1 then reset the baseline after you have edited the
rates.

If you are using Earned value you can also choose which baseline earned
value is calculated on under Tolls, Options, Calculation tab.

 

[Jon Baldan]

Rod, thanks for you response. I am having some challenges
understanding some of what you have written and maybe you can provide
further assistance.

1) How can you copy a baseline? I can see how you can save another
baseline, but cannot see how to copy one baseline into another.

2) When you say "reset the baseline", do you mean re-basline the plan?
If you do, then this will not necessarily achieve what we desire as
the actuals previously recorded following the original baseline will
adjust the duration and hence will affect any further baselining done
on this project.

What we want to achieve is to hold the original baselined duration and
effort and update the baselined costs only, knowing that actuals have
already been recorded and have potentially adjusted the durations of
tasks.

For example, I have 2 tasks each of 10 days, task 2 being a successor
to task 1. We baseline this with a resource at $100/day. Total cost on
baseline should be $2000. We record actuals against task 1 (say 7
days) and the task is now complete, bring task 2 forward by 3 days.

Management has now said that as of 5 days into Task 2, the cost of the
resource is now $200/day. We want to go back and recalculate the cost
to come up to $2500 (based on the original duration baselined), not
$1900 based on the actuals recorded, which would incorporate the
duration changes.

We need to do this because our status reporting is based on the
original duration, not the updated duration. Please see the table
below to understand the result we are trying to achieve. Thanks again
in advance.

Day Original Cost Updated Cost
1 $100 $100
2 $100 $100
3 $100 $100
4 $100 $100
5 $100 $100
6 $100 $100
7 $100 $100
8 $100 $100
9 $100 $100
10 $100 $100
11 $100 $100
12 $100 $100
13 $100 $100
14 $100 $100
15 $100 $100
16 $100 $200
17 $100 $200
18 $100 $200
19 $100 $200
20 $100 $200
$2000 $2500

 

[Rod Gill]

1) In the save baseline dialog, use save Interim options. This of course
only works in 2002+ that has 10 extra baselines.

2) Yes.
Saving a baseline has no effect on durations.
If you only want to reset Cost baselines you will need to write a VBA macro
to do that or get Project 2003 so you can preserve the original baseline
data in one of the baselines whilst using the others for your new baseline.

Project only calculates costs based on scheduled work and current rates. If
you set a rate to apply from a certain date, it won't change actual costs.
However, if actual duration is 7d then duration is now 7d so any
recalculated costs will always be calculated from now on with 7d.

If you want costs to be calculated using original Baseline duration of 10d
you will need to write a VBA macro to calculate new costs. Once you've said
a task only takes 7d, Project uses that 7d, not the original baseline
duration for cost calculation.