Baseline and Interim Plans in MS Project

MS Project has 11 Baselines wherein you can save different variables to reflect shift from planned and actual values. Variables which gets saved with each baseline are – Budget Cost, Budget Work, Cost, Work, Start, Finish, Duration, Fixed cost, Fixed Cost Accural, Baseline Deliverables Start and Baseline Deliverables Finish.

Baseline 0 is by default used for all the calculations which includes Earned Value and other Variances parameters. But we can always change the Baseline which could be used for Calculations of Earned Value. Still, most of the Project Manager prefers using Baseline 0 to store the latest vaules of baseline parameters for calculations and keep copying older baselines to Baseline 1, 2 and so on.

To Change the EV Baseline, go to File -> Options -> Advance and from drop-down select the desired baseline for calculation.

Once we have exhausted our 11 baselines, we still have option to use Interim Plan to save 10 Start and Finish Dates to store the snapshot of dates. Note – we cannot save other parameters while using Interim Plan. Also, Earned Value calculations cannot be based on Interim Plan as it is just storing 2 parameters.

 

So in short if you are just tracking Start/Finish Variances you have total of 21 Date fields to store these snapshots Baseline 0-11 and Interim Plan 1-10.

 

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% Work Complete not rolling on Summary Tasks

Minute issue, that few users ends up doing – while testing some parameters forgetting to put in the appropriate information for the Calculations.

I created 5 tasks and started updating % Work Complete in sub-tasks, but % Work Complete at Summary Task is not getting rolled up as can be seen in the snapshot below.

Now, go and assign the resources to the tasks, which will popluate the Work field. So, now when you update the % Work Complete it will roll-up to Summary Task.

Formula for % Work Complete is Actual Work/Work * 100, so if resources are not assigned Work will be 0, no matter if Summary task is auto or manual it won’t roll-up for Summary.

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Notify Users If Plan Gets Opened in Read Only Mode

Recently Received a query from user, at times users open plan from server without noticing that plan is already checked out, hence ending up opening plan in read only mode (though the open dialog box itself displays the project check in state and whom it is checked out to, but doesn’t displays warning ), they make on all the changes and don’t realize untill they try to save the plan 😦

So here is a quick n easy solution by which you can explicitly notify users, in case they open plan in read only mode,
place the macro given below in global file, which would fire on Project Open event and would notify users just in case plan has been opened up in read only mode, thereby saving hours of planning effort 🙂

Sub TestProjectReadOnlyState()
    If ActiveProject.ReadOnly = True Then
        MsgBox (“Project has opened in Readonly mode”)
    End If
End Sub

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