Saving Baseline (Project for the Web)
One of the biggest advantages of the MS Project (and Project Online) to the other compactor products in web based platforms is the possibility of having Baselines. Without a Baseline controlling the plan and having Planned vs Actual stats wouldn't be easy.
Please add the option of saving baseline on any given status of the plan without overwriting them so w can compare current status with multiple baselines.
Naser
shared this idea
Hi everyone!
Thanks for the feedback on baselines. I’d love to hear more, and get a discussion going to understand the needs and usage here.
What’s the most important set of information in a baseline? How often do you take baselines? How often do you compare baselines?
For those of you who have not previously used the desktop client or Project Online, how have you been tracking baselines on your projects?
Thanks!
~J
30 comments
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Anonymous
commented
From the comments, it seems like project for the web team should be investing more on version controlling projects in pwa compared to creating baselines.
The version control feature should allow users to compare current plan against any previous versions and see changes that have been made not just to time related fields but any fields in that project.
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PJ
commented
Baseline is absolutely critical to the point that without that, our PMO wont shortlist any software's to implement and that is the current bottleneck with Project for the web.
Baselines are the only reason why we have not moved from Planview Enterprise One to Project for the web.
Most important set of information - Baseline Start and Baseline Finish Date ; Variance visualized as translucent Gantt bars behind current task bars in timeline view, could also be just lines at the bottom of the current tasks in timeline view which when hovered over shows the variance. Also a variance column would be great addition.Frequency of Baseline Capture - once in 2 weeks and at phase level.
Compare baseline - Every day / week.
We have been tracking baselines since 2013 and is crucial part of our Project Approval committee reviews.It is essential that only the Project Admin has access to this baseline and no one else, so that would mean, you guys need to take care of user roles as well with this feature.
Now that we have moved to more agile and hybrid project management, We track tasks using Planview Projectplace(no baseline feature) and sync back to Planview Enterprise One(this tool has baselines and syncs tasks and timeline with projectplace 1:1 and is pretty robust but other things are a bit annoying to use) So, we use 2 tools, one agile and one advanced software to track baselines.
Very compelled to move to Project for the web but we really really need the Baseline feature added.
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Anonymous
commented
Each week I would review the plan. During the week both myself and other people would modify the plan either directly or through changes to resource availability. Each week I would take a baseline so the following week I could see what had changed.
Having only one baseline was very limiting. I also made a copy every week so I could compare older versions which was a painful manual process.
What I really wanted to do was to keep every weekly baseline, give names to baselines at key points in the project and then be able to easily compare the current plan to any previous baseline.
Another way of looking at it is a file versioning, similarly to the way I can compare any two versions of a Word document on SharePoint.
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Anonymous
commented
Need to at least have the beginning baseline. This is typically the one which was committed to by the project team.
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Pozoi
commented
Baseline is critical. Most important baseline is at the begin - once the plan is officially approved it is saved as baseline. To do this would mean a lot.
Everything else is, sorry, a mess! -
Anonymous
commented
Q: What’s the most important set of information in a baseline? How often do you take baselines? How often do you compare baselines?
A: The MVP is that there is one set of baseline fields that can be set and re-set. I think a better implementation is dynamic versioning. E.g. Wrike uses multiple snapshots which are auto-generated as plans are updated and can be - optionally - named. You can then compare current plan to any of these versions. There are other similar versioning models to this, like e.g. Google Docs on OnShape, where a new version is automatically created every time the model/document/project is updated and can be named. I think this is the ideal functionality.
Comparing to baseline is something you would typically do almost daily, but certainly weekly.
Q: For those of you who have not previously used the desktop client or Project Online, how have you been tracking baselines on your projects?
A: You can't! Other than managing it a spreadsheet or something.
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Anonymous
commented
Baselines are very important from a lessons-learned perspective. A PMO needs to be able to compare planned vs real timelines at the end of each project's phase and assess the impacts on them so they can make sure to avoid for the future.
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Anonymous
commented
Baselines are crucial, especially for bigger teams: PMO needs to compare planned vs real at the end of each project's phase, so they create a baseline at the beginning of each phase and compare it to real at the end. PMs change short-term plans and dates within the projects but the baselines give PMO a chance to check how effectively they delivered at the end, no matter the changes.
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Adrienne Radesky
commented
Microsoft Project Team- is there any update on baselines? This is so important to tracking changes made in Project 4 the Web (actuals). I am having to export my tasks lists manually and comparing the variances manually to understand the changes.
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Michael
commented
It is important for clients to track the original estimated hours that was sold for the delivery of the project to ensure we deliver on target and do not go over. The wbs on the project can change alot throughout the project and so can not be used to hold as the original estimates. I am being asked about this a lot with PSA also
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Steve
commented
Baseline management is critical in analyzing a project team's performance in Agile or Predictive project management. Multiple baseline "snapshots" for point-in-time reporting and analysis is important.
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Anonymous
commented
Project for Web. Add simple 'Baseline task' button in list and board view, to enable simple tracking of project slippage.
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Anonymous
commented
Project for Web. Add simple 'Baseline task' button in list and board view, to enable simple tracking of project slippage.
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Vincent Boutin
commented
We set project baselines at every gate to keep track of the original gates/launch dates commitment. We then use these values to measure our selves (KPI) thru power BI reports. this is a must for us. we won't move to the new project version without this feature.
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Jerome
commented
I agree.
my users are using baseline intensively.
if they dont have this with the new version, they'll just not use it at all.
its a must have feature.
by the way everything in project online must be supported, cutting features is generally a very bad idea. -
felipe binimelis
commented
Baseline provides the snapshot to compare how we're going and we can move the dates during the project without forgetting the original plan.
We need to get baseline at least from Schedule Gantt chart, -
Alex Lyaschenko
commented
Hi ~J,
My response is below:Project on the Web developed as part of Power platform and it ic ritical to be able mesure project's progress with Power BI reports.
There are 3 main mesures which normally used on porfolio level (in priority order):
- Progress against latest commitment (aka Baseline)
- Progress against last reporting period (aka Snapshot)
- Progress against original commitment (aka baseline).It is critical to be able to control who can do baselines. Often baseline controlled by a group (aka role) who is responsible for that.
Other function is allows users to create own snapshots any point of time and them mesure some parameters (dates, durction, Status).
Thanks
Alex Lyaschenko -
Ben Howard
commented
So the need is simple, I need to compare what I planned to what happened and to my latest estimates, for duration, dates and effort values. The is a point in the lifecycle of the project where I have to put my "stake in the sand" and that's my current "target plan", it's how I'll measure whether I'm on track to deliver or not. At various other points in the lifecycle my target plan might/will change, especially with approved changes, and so I'll need to have opportunity to save multiple targets plans. If terms of comparing them, I'll need to visualise this (typically a tracking gantt type view) but I also need to compare the changes in terms of numbers (eg difference in number of tasks (summary, milestone, normal) between a target plan and the current plan, difference in effort/duration,start,finish dates). I want to be able to answer the following question, i) where I am in terms of my current plan (to tracking to my current schedule) and then more formally, where am I against my target plan (and the ability to track against multiple targets especially at the end of the project during the project wash up). Personally I only see the need for two target plans (original and current target). I only want a nominated single person to be able to save a target plan.
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Naser
commented
Please don't step into the limited number of Baselines trap!
Let us save Baseline as many times as we want and just use different IDs or versions to keep records of baselines.
Remember that sometimes we need to save a baseline only due to changes in some tasks not entire project which concludes a new number/version of baseline.
Even the concept of "Protected" or "Non Protected" baseline can be managed differently. I'd suggest you add an extra field that indicates if the baseline approved or not? By doing this later (once you implemented more advanced security and access groups settings) access to that field can be limited to specific user group.
In other word, theoretically we can have unlimited number of baselines which some of them are signed-off/approved and some not. -
Esteban Galindo
commented
Hi,
We take a baseline two times in the life of a project, which are our two most important review and approval stage gates. We use those baselines every two weeks to compare our current schedule to the "committed one" and report accordingly. Most of the time comparisons are about dates only, but from time to time, there is a project in which we load all the resources information (people and money) and use the baseline also to find resources differences; this use of baselines, however, is not common for us and we use it only on very specific cases.