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Baseline vs. Forecast Schedule with EVM

6 replies [Last post]
Wed, 2008-09-17 12:35
Steve Macauley
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Hi, I’d like to gauge opinion re: Baselines. We use MSP for Earned Value Management and have had difficulty simply using the MSP baseline function out of the box. Inadvertent deletion of tasks/resources also removes the baseline for those activities, which pollutes the EVM baseline. Also the baseline can’t be easily re-rated. My organisation therefore uses a two-schedule system, where the baseline is locked away and a separate, forecast-schedule is used for monthly updates. The dowside of this approach is that when a baseline change is required, both schedules must be changed simultaneously....a time consuming process.

Does anyone else use a similar system, or have you solved these problems another way?
Regards... Steve Mac.
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Replies

Mon, 2008-10-13 08:38
#1
Philip Kearney
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That sounds like something similar I had faced a couple of years where I had to constantly change the schedule around while trying to monitor progress.

I came up with a solution with the approval of the project manager.
The idea of the baseline appealed to him so I explained to him that with the liklihood of the programme being changed around so much due to outside forces, I would use excel to monitor the changes to baseline in terms of work effort.
Ther first programme that was agreed, I imported the data to excel & set up the baseline no.1 in graph format.
Any changes to the schedule became the working programme so I was monitoring the working programme for progress.
With the baseline in the background, I exported work & actual work into excel to enable me to show the variance between the baseline, working programme & the actual progress in excel format with satisfactory EVM results & a very satisfield project manager!
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Thu, 2008-09-18 10:48
#2
Steve Macauley
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Hey Trevor,
I want to come back to Aus and work in Shipbuilding....I love the idea of immovable baselines. Unfortunately with a 6000 line schedule our baselines have a habit of changing due to customer/supplier renegotiation, rolling wave planning, risk occurrence, organisational changes, labour rate changes etc. I guess you have similar issues, but less frequently?

Alexandre,
We already have an EVM tool to generate the graphs, it’s maintaining baseline integrity I’m really worried about.

Cheers...
Steve
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Thu, 2008-09-18 09:53
#3
Trevor Rabey
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Baseline means Baseline.
It doesn’t change.
It’s not supposed to.
There wouldn’t be any point in having it if it did change.
If you delete a Task, then that Task no longer exists, so of course its Baseline does not exist.
This is perfectly reasonable to me.
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Thu, 2008-09-18 09:34
#4
Steve Macauley
User offline. Last seen 11 years 24 weeks ago. Offline
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I don’t do easy questions. ;-) No I’m not surprised that MSP deletes the baseline. This is a symptom of MSP. I use a "locked away and separate" contract baseline but our EVM tool requires a rolling baseline to store changes to BCWS information. You could use the baseline information in the current schedule for this purpose, but it’s fragile and not easy to change resource rates of task baselines. A solution is to use a separate ’baseline schedule’ which should mirror the baseline in the ’current schedule’, but which is easier to control. This seems to work quite well, but carries a significant overhead, as you have to maintain an EVM baseline and a tracking baseline (for tracking Gantt’s etc). I was wondering which method of working is more popular and whether anyone has developed alternative workarounds to the issues discussed above.
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