Introduction

In the scheduling and project management world, there are plenty of opinions regarding which scheduling software is better in general, or a better fit for specific situations. If you’re considering which software to invest in, Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project, you can find numerous articles and forums online to help guide your decision.  But, at ProjectControls.online (PC.o), we’ve noticed that most people aren’t trying to decide which software to buy; they are trying to figure out how to make the one they have work. In this series, we show how PC.o solves multiple issues  of both P6 and MS Project.  To start, we’ll begin this week with Managing MS Project Baselines, what the issues are, and how PC.o solves the baseline problem with MS Project.

Schedule Baselines

A baseline schedule is one of the most important project documents, establishing the basis for progress tracking and performance measurement. The Baseline outlines the project execution strategy, the work breakdown structure, activity planned dates and durations, and key project milestones. At its essence, it is a snapshot of the project just before execution.  Recognizing its importance and that sometimes the plan changes, MS Project supports the storing and management of 11 baselines within one MS Project file. So, how does it fall short?

MS Project Baselines: A Partial Snapshot

Baselines are created by telling MS Project to store the current schedule as a snapshot in time. This can be done at the beginning of a project or at any point in its execution. Unfortunately, this is only a partial snapshot. When MS Project stores the baseline, it only stores early dates, durations, work, and cost data. The snapshot does not store logic (i.e. predecessors, successors, and relationship types), float, or activity constraints. Moreover, the partial snapshot does not store CPM late dates; therefore, variance measurements can only be compared to early dates. Essentially, MS Project is just storing a few pieces of schedule information, not an actual schedule.  So little information is stored that you cannot recreate the data into a fully functional schedule again. The baseline schedule (unless otherwise copied and saved) is lost.

Timing is Everything

In MS Project, all “Baseline” information and interim plans are stored within the MS Project file  as simply dates and costs in the current schedule. You cannot import or export a baseline.  If you want a schedule snapshot to be stored in MS Project, you have one chance to do so.  Even if you copied a schedule (i.e. saved the original baseline as a separate file), you cannot import and assign that snapshot to the active schedule file.  Once a desired snapshot in time has been past (even if copied), there is no easy way to use MS Project as the tool to visualize, compare, and analyze the differences between the active schedule and that snapshot. 

Some All-Too-Common Situations

1| Forget to Set

The scheduler built the project schedule with input from project stakeholders. At a certain point, the project manager and scheduler decide the baseline schedule is complete. So, the scheduler saves a copy and starts updating the schedule. Oops! The scheduler forgot to set the baseline in MS Project. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, timing is everything; there’s no easy way to go back. Of course, there are workarounds or rework, but this isn’t the only situation where MS Project baselines fall short.

2| Comparing Updates

Schedule best management practices advise the scheduler to save every complete schedule update, to document progress and evolving project plans. To compare the active schedule to any previous update requires these snapshots to be set as baselines in MS Project. No problem…unless you have more than 11 combined baselines and updates.  MS Project’s limitations for storing “baseline” dates and costs and updates significantly restricts the use of MS Project for schedule comparisons.

3| Time Impact Analyses (TIAs)

Storing updates is also an essential component of time impact analyses. In good practice, copies of the project schedule file are saved after significant changes to the schedule and progress updates. This creates snapshots of the project should schedule impact analyses be warranted. TIAs often require the comparison of impacted schedules to the baseline or to previous schedule updates before the impact occurred. This comparison, in other software, can be made by assigning schedule snapshots as baselines, in order to calculate variances.  Unfortunately, if you didn’t set a certain schedule snapshot as a baseline in MS Project or ran out of available baselines to set, you can’t perform the analysis within the software: a third-party tool would be required.  

4| Re-Baseline

The project’s baseline must be completely defined and documented before the project execution and control activities can begin. Once the project starts, the baseline is put under change control to help you evaluate any further change and its impact on the project. On some projects, the owner or contractor may want to re-baseline the project schedule after a notable change in the project scope or after a significant impact, like COVID-19 work stoppages. One method of re-baselining is to insert the changes into the original baseline schedule to determine a revised project completion. Unfortunately, In MS Project, you cannot create a new Baseline Schedule from the original file and assign it to the updated progress schedule.

Our Solution

PC.o solves all these issues within our Portfolio section.  PC.o Portfolios allows you to assign a proper baseline, and proper update whether P6 or MSP.  PC.o then runs a full analysis of the changes between the baseline and every update added, storing and analyzing the entire schedule.  The Portfolio section allows creates an EPS, allowing you to roll up Portfolio Projects to Portfolio’s with a proper EPS.  Allowing you to not only clearly see baseline changes / impacts/analysis, but project/program roll-ups, dashboard values, cashflows of multiple projects.

There may be too many great advantages of MS Project to change software just to manage project baselines more efficiently. Often the user doesn’t have the option to change scheduling software; they have to figure out how to make it work. We built ProjectControls.online to solve some of the common grievances we have with P6 and MS Project, including managing MS Project baselines.

On PC.o, you can

• upload any number of MS Project files.
• view and share these schedules online, without needing a scheduling software.
• assign any uploaded schedule as a baseline to any other schedule.
• analyze any schedule, compare schedules against each other, or monitor trends across many.
• export to MS Excel or convert to Primavera P6.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use PC.o to make MS Project and Primavera P6 work better for you, check out our video tutorials on YouTube, request a demo, or leave us a question in the comment section.

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