Create a Baseline

Quick reference

• 00:04 Some congratulations are in order for you.
• 00:06 You just built your first project plan.
• 00:10 You have all of the tasks, durations, predecessors all laid out.
• 00:14 You've addressed resource overallocation issues, and
• 00:17 now it's time to start tracking your project.
• 00:20 Before you start tracking your project, what you want to do is save a baseline.
• 00:25 This way, as tasks get completed and they start early,
• 00:30 start late, you can actually do some comparisons.
• 00:34 So this way, you can tell whether or
• 00:36 not your project is on track to deliver, based on budget and schedule.
• 00:41 I'm going to show you how to set a baseline in this lesson.
• 00:45 Setting a baseline is easy.
• 00:48 Click the Project tab, locate the Schedule section,
• 00:53 click the Set Baseline icon, and then choose the Set Baseline menu item.
• 01:01 At this point, all you need to do is click the OK button, but
• 01:04 let me walk you through a few of the various settings here.
• 01:09 First, you can see there's a baseline option selected in this pick list.
• 01:14 If I expand the list, you can see that there's also a one through ten.
• 01:20 Now, most of the out-of-the-box views within Microsoft Project just use
• 01:24 baseline.
• 01:25 And what's gonna happen when we choose this,
• 01:28 is it's actually going to copy a lot of the settings, like the duration,
• 01:32 the start, the finish, to extra fields called the baseline fields.
• 01:38 This way, when we change our project,
• 01:40 we can compare our current schedule against the baseline.
• 01:45 So essentially, we're making a copy of our schedule.
• 01:48 And there's some limitations to that, which I'll discuss in a few moments.
• 01:52 There's a baseline one through ten as well.
• 01:55 I do not suggest that you use these as you get started.
• 01:59 Just focus on using the baseline.
• 02:01 As you get more advanced, you'll find various uses for these baselines.
• 02:07 There's also this option to set an interim plan.
• 02:10 And here is where you can actually set additional fields where you want to copy
• 02:15 project data.
• 02:15 We're not going to use that, because that's a more advanced topic.
• 02:20 You can also choose just selected tasks and
• 02:24 decide how you want the summaries to roll up.
• 02:26 Again, more of a advanced topic.
• 02:30 So we're just going to choose entire project.
• 02:33 And this is a setting that most people use when they use
• 02:36 the baseline feature in Project.
• 02:38 Click the OK button.
• 02:41 Nothing really exciting happened here.
• 02:43 We click the OK button and everything kind of looks the same in our project.
• 02:48 However, things aren't the same in the background.
• 02:50 As a matter of fact, every task and
• 02:53 every assignment on your project can have hundreds of fields associated with them.
• 02:59 For example, here in this Gantt Chart view we have right now, we have Task Name,
• 03:02 Duration, Predecessor, Start, Finish, Resource Name, but
• 03:07 there's hundreds more fields.
• 03:08 Let's just right-click on the Duration column and
• 03:14 choose Insert Column and type Baseline Duration and press Enter.
• 03:20 And here you can see this is a copy of the duration for our baseline.
• 03:27 So if this is our baseline, the copy, and
• 03:30 this is our working duration, our current estimate,
• 03:35 if I change this duration to let's say 40 days,
• 03:39 you can see here that this baseline duration never changed.
• 03:45 And that's because we wanna use this for comparative purposes.
• 03:50 I'll go ahead and remove Baseline Duration from this view by right-clicking and
• 03:55 choosing Hide Column.
• 03:57 When you choose Hide Column,
• 03:59 ignore this little X here that makes it look like you're deleting things.
• 04:02 You're not.
• 04:02 You're just hiding the column.
• 04:05 Let's go to the View tab.
• 04:08 And let's click the Tables pick list.
• 04:12 And choose Variance.
• 04:14 Microsoft already set up a few different views for
• 04:17 us that allow us to look at variance.
• 04:21 So if we just expand a few things here,
• 04:29 What we can see is the start date and the finish date for
• 04:33 our project, then the baseline start, and the baseline finish.
• 04:41 What you can see here is that there’s a finish of 12/1/15,
• 04:47 but the baseline finish was 11/13/2015,
• 04:52 with a finish variance of ten days.
• 04:57 Now why do all these other things say ten days?
• 05:00 Well, remember that we have a task that's red that's on the critical path.
• 05:05 So what we've essentially done is we've modified that duration and
• 05:11 it's affected all of the following tasks, right down to the end of the project.
• 05:17 So this is where the power of the baseline comes in, and I'll
• 05:21 be showing you with reports how you can even make more use of this baseline field.

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