Create a Baseline

Quick reference

• 00:04 Some congratulations are in order for you.
• 00:06 You just built your first project plan.
• 00:09 You have all of the tasks, durations, predecessors all laid out.
• 00:13 You've addressed resource over allocation issues and
• 00:17 now it's time to start tracking your project.
• 00:20 Before you start tracking your project, what you'll want to do is save a baseline.
• 00:24 This way, as tasks get completed and they start early,
• 00:28 start late, you can actually do some comparisons.
• 00:32 So this way you can tell whether or
• 00:35 not your project is on track to deliver based on budget and schedule.
• 00:39 I'm going to show you how to set a baseline in this lesson.
• 00:42 Setting a baseline is easy.
• 00:45 Click the Project tab, locate the schedule section,
• 00:50 click the Set Baseline icon.
• 00:53 And then choose the Set Baseline menu item.
• 00:57 At this point, all you need to do is click the OK button but
• 01:01 let me walk you through a few of the various settings here.
• 01:05 First, you can see there's a baseline option selected in this pick list.
• 01:10 If I expand the list, you can see that there's also a 1 through 10.
• 01:16 Now, most of the out of the box views within Microsoft Project just use
• 01:21 baseline.
• 01:21 And what's going to happen when we choose this is it's actually going to copy
• 01:26 a lot of the settings like the duration, the start,
• 01:30 the finish to extra fields called the baseline fields.
• 01:33 This way when we change our project,
• 01:36 we can compare our current schedule against the baseline.
• 01:40 So essentially we're making a copy of our schedule.
• 01:43 And there's some limitations to that which I'll discuss in a few moments.
• 01:47 There's a baseline 1 through 10 as well.
• 01:50 I do not suggest that you use these as you get started,
• 01:54 just focus on using the baseline.
• 01:56 As you get more advanced, you'll find various uses for these baselines.
• 02:01 There's also this option to set an interim plan.
• 02:04 And here's where you can actually set additional fields where you want to copy
• 02:09 project data.
• 02:10 We're not going to use that because that's a more advanced topic.
• 02:15 You can also choose just selected tasks and
• 02:18 decide how you want the summaries to roll up.
• 02:21 Again, more of a advanced topic.
• 02:25 So we're just going to choose Entire Project.
• 02:27 And this is the setting that most people use when they use the baseline feature and
• 02:32 project.
• 02:33 Click the OK button.
• 02:35 Nothing really exciting happens here.
• 02:37 We click the OK button and everything kind of looks the same in our project.
• 02:42 However, things aren't the same in the background.
• 02:45 As a matter of fact, every task, and every assignment on your project,
• 02:50 can have hundreds of fields associated with them.
• 02:53 For example, here in this Gantt chart view we have right now, we have task name,
• 02:58 duration, predecessor, start, finish, resource name, but
• 03:01 there's hundreds more fields.
• 03:03 Let's just right click on the Duration column and
• 03:08 choose Insert column and type, baseline duration and press Enter.
• 03:15 And here you can see this is a copy of the duration for our baseline.
• 03:21 So if this is our baseline, the copy,
• 03:24 and this is our working duration, our current estimate.
• 03:29 If I change this duration to, let's say 40 days,
• 03:33 you can see here that this baseline duration never changed.
• 03:38 And that's because we want to use this for comparative purposes.
• 03:43 I'll go ahead and remove baseline duration from this view by right clicking and
• 03:49 choosing Hide Column.
• 03:50 When you choose Hide Column, ignore this little x here that makes it look like
• 03:54 you're deleting things, you're not.
• 03:56 You're just hiding the column.
• 03:59 Let's go to the View tab and
• 04:02 let's click the Tables pick list and choose Variance.
• 04:08 Microsoft already set up a few different views for
• 04:11 us that allow us to look at variance.
• 04:14 So if we just expand a few things here,
• 04:23 What we can see is the start date and the finish date for
• 04:27 our project, then the baseline start and the baseline finish.
• 04:33 What you can see here is that there's a finish of 12/1/15 but
• 04:39 the baseline finish was 11/13/2015,
• 04:44 with a finish variance of 10 days.
• 04:47 Now, why do all these other things say 10 days?
• 04:50 Well, remember that we have a task that's red that's on the critical path.
• 04:56 So what we've essentially done is we've modified that duration, and
• 05:00 it's affected all of the following tasks, right down to the end of the project.
• 05:06 So this is where the power of the baseline comes in and I'll be showing you
• 05:11 with reports how you can even make more use of this baseline field.

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