UPDATING THE PROJECT

In your current schedule, I suggest you to use the UDF to define your planned dates. That will be a static dates. It can be customized in anyway you want and there is no linked with the early or actual dates of your current schedule.

Planned Dates in the current schedule shall be ALWAYS equal to the Baseline dates. This is contrary to P6 behavior as presented by other experts.

In anyway, UDF will solve it.

The very first time you made your schedule, planned dates equals early dates.

Once you have progressed your schedule, planned dates will surely change if you were not progressing exactly as planned; 

So as your critical path; Planned dates will always be equal to forecasted early dates (from my understanding);

Planned dates from a Baseline Schedule maybe different from your current schedule or progressed schedule;

Of course changes will always occur if your schedule is dynamic. 

If you dont want the software to automatically calculate planned dates, then you can simply draw a bar-chart with fixed dates or maybe you can constrain all your activities; Anyway the software will never read what's on your mind. 

Rafael,

It's even worse than you describe.

When an activity has not yet started, the planned dates are automatically set as equal to the early dates of the task each time you schedule the programme. So an activity that is in progress or complete will have planned dates equal to the last early dates calculated immediately before the "start" checkbox is marked. Depending on your update routine, at best this will be the early dates from the end of the last update cycle before the activity started, but it will often actually be a completely meaningless set of dates, as planners schedule multiple times during an update.

What is even worse, is that these planned dates are the default dates Primavera uses to display the baseline bar on the gantt chart.

Utterly ridiculous.

DC:

Check out this link to a presentation by Paul Harris on the subject. He describes the issue very well.

http://eastwoodharris.com/DL/TP/110616_P6_V7_What_Baseline_Bars_am_I_Displaying.pdf

Before progressing with your changes any further, I advise you read and understand this presentation, then explain it to your PM, then make sure you both understand what he really wants you to do. I suspect he is as confused as most people are about planned dates in Primavera, and probably wants you to ammend baseline and/or early dates instead.

The basic problem you seem to be facing is the fact that you can enter any date you like for the planned dates, but unless the activity has started, they will automatically revert back to the early dates when you next re-schedule

the project manager want me to change the planned start and finish dates for not started activities

From the reference

If there is no progress on the activity the planned start date is set to the early start.  Planned finish  is calculated by adding the original duration to the planned start as shown in Figure 15 below.  Early start and the planned start are not directly linked.  If you change the planned start date  manually start date will change but early start will not change.  Schedule CPM calculation will  overwrite the user input with the calculated early start date.  There is no warning to the user that  their input will be overwritten.

Ask your PM to take a P6 course on planned dates so he can understand the above.

But this is not finished yet....

The user can input a planned finish to overwrite the calculated planned finish.  This change will  also automatically change the original duration of the activity and there is no warning to the user.

If the activity is in progress, then planned start is set equal to actual start.  Planned finish is  calculated by adding the original duration to the planned start as shown in Figure 16 below.  The  user can input a planned finish to overwrite the calculated planned finish.  Once again, this  change will also automatically change the original duration of the activity and there is no warning  to the user. 

So how do the planned start/planned finish dates come into play for you? These are not static like  the baseline, nor are they dynamic like early dates. They are involved if you use Apply Actuals or  Update Progress.   The user can change the planned dates as desired.  If there is no baseline  assigned, then the planned dates are used for calculating the variances.   Planned dates also  have the potential to overwrite your actual start/actual finish with the planned start/planned finish  dates.  It is a highly suspect feature that automatically overwrites actual dates.  Once done, everything looks like it occurred according to the original baseline plan.

INSANE I am still wondering what is the purpose of planned dates as implemented in P6.  I suggest you ask Primavera/ORACLE support what is the purpose of planned dates. 

Planned Start and Planned Finish Dates are different for different software.

If you are using P6 then it shall be easy to understand as ease of use is their slogan. The following reference might help you if you are using P6.

http://www.ronwinterconsulting.com/Understanding_P6_Dates.pdf

A piece of cake, easy to understand, a single meaning to avoid confusion, very intuitive.