PPO allows for the capturing of baselines by making use of a Baseline Date field on the project entity, as well as two calculated fields on the tasks entity. Project Stakeholders can track the slippage of the project schedule through the Task Variance Report.
Watch this short video to learn more about the Baselining of Tasks Capability:
Capturing your baseline
The first step is making sure your schedule is uploaded into PPO before any baselining date is set. Once the project stakeholders have decided to baseline the project, the date on which you baseline the project must be set on the project entity (for example the project was baselined on the 6th of February 2023).
The Baseline Date entered is then used to populate the Baseline Start Date and Baseline End Date calculations on each task. The value in the Baseline Start and Baseline End Date calculations is the Planned Start and Planned End date as it was on the date the project was baselined (in our example: as it was on the 6th of February 2023).
As the Planned End Date is changed by the project stakeholders, a variance between the Baseline dates and the Planned dates starts to become visible to project stakeholders on the Task Variance Report.
This short video describes in more detail how the baselining functionality works in PPO.
Re-baselining your project
Re-baselining your project is as simple as editing the project and changing the Baseline Date field to the new baseline date. The baseline calculations on the task entity will then re-calculate to reflect the planned start and planned end date as at the new baseline date entered when re-baselining your project (for example the project was re-baselined to the 7th of March 2023).
It is always good practice to make sure you have a change request/scope change captured on your project to request/approve the project being re-baselined. See the following knowledge base article on scope changes.
Once the project has been re-baselined you can again use the Task Variance Report to manage the slippage.
Task Variance Report
The variance shown on the Task Variance Report is the difference between the Baseline Start Date and Planned Start Date, between the Baseline End Date and the Planned End Date, and also between the Planned End Date and Actual End Date.
Additional considerations
- The Baseline Date field on the Projects entity can be protected by a Validation Rule. This can ensure that only certain users have access to add or change the Baseline Date. For more information on Validation Rules, please see the following knowledge base article.
- The baseline dates and variances can also be shown on a Project Manager Dashboard as an example. Please log a support ticket should you want to customise your Project Manager Dashboard.