Managing Baselines in Primavera P6

hi there Neil Smith here with 10-6 consulting and in this video I'm going to show you how to manage baselines in Primavera p6 now managing baselines is actually a two-step process we have to create the baseline and then we have to assign it to one of four baseline types that's a project baseline and three user baselines so let's see how that works in the software I'll show you right now okay so here's a sample schedule and we're going to use this to demonstrate how to maintain baselines in Primavera p6 so I'm going to go to the project menu and I'm going to go to the maintain baselines menu option in the resulting dialog we can see here an add button I'm going to click that this will add a baseline to the project now literally what it's going to do if I go with this first option is to save a copy of the project as a new baseline literally it's going to make a complete copy of the entire project in the database and I can use that as my baseline this second option is something I will explain a little later in this video save a copy of the current project let's click OK and quite quickly it makes a copy of the project and there's our baseline if I click on this I can make some edits in the lower portion of the screen we could change the name of this I can type it in there if I want to change that from something other than b1 I'll leave it at b1 for this baseline type these are some labels if you've loaded the sample data you'll have a similar list of the one you're seeing here customer sign-off baseline let's go with that one and close that now I mentioned it's a two-step process in the introduction the second part of this process is to assign that baseline to this project now it's linked to it but it's not assigned to anything yet and it can be assigned to one of four options I'm going to go up to the project menu choose assign baselines and take a look at this dialog here it's offering the option to assign this as the project baseline the primary user baseline secondary and tertiary user baselines what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to assign it to the project baseline and because I don't have any other baselines created at the moment I'm going to also assign it as the primary use a baseline and you'll see why I'll do that in a minute so basically I've told p6 to use this baseline as both the project baseline and the primary baseline now the project baseline would be considered the master baseline for this project and the primary baseline is a user baseline which can be used for more interim things such as periodic baselines taking a snapshot every quarter that kind of thing so these are more ad hoc this usually falls onto some kind of change control and I'm going to say okay now how do we see the results of adding these baselines to the software the first thing I would do is right click here in the Gantt chart area and choose bars and I'm going to switch on some baseline bars so I can see the baselines I'm scrolling down here to the primary baseline and if I scroll down a little further I'll click down a little further we have the baseline milestone option here as well I want to see baseline markers at where my milestones and my activities are so I've chosen those two options if I say ok to that you'll see that as appeared on the screen there we have a baseline marker under the milestones showing up as a little yellow diamond and we have a bar under each of the activities now let me just demonstrate by changing the duration of this activity by some amount it will put them as a critical activity so it's pushed the old schedule out so you can see if this one slips everything's going to slip that's where it was supposed to start this is where it's going to start now that is your variance and without a baseline we wouldn't have been able to see that okay let's put that back to its original date now I need to show you another feature about baselines which is unique to Primavera p6 and we have the ability to export that baseline or a copy of the baseline depends which way you want to go as a separate project I'll show you I'm going back to the project menu and maintain baselines and here I'm going to make a copy of this baseline using the copy button let's click that so that's two identical copies of that baseline now what I'm going to show you now is a little unusual but it's a very useful feature particularly when you're dealing with a database based tool like Primavera p6 you will be surprised how often you find this useful I'm going to restore that meaning I'm going to unlink it from this project and create a new project with that baseline so I'm going to click the restore button right there and it wants to know if I'm sure I want to unlink that yes I do and it's disappeared from this list it's no longer available as a baseline to this project and where it's actually ended up if we go to the projects view is right there it's now a project in its own right I can literally open this project so how I've often used this is to make a change to a baseline I would unlink the project open it as I've just done make a change here and then save that back and restore it as a baseline in the original project let's say I wanted to change the duration of mobilisation to 5 days let's reduce the whole project there now I will go back to the projects menu here open the original project again go to the project's menu got to maintain baselines and what I'll do here is say add convert another copy of a project to a baseline of the current project so I'm going to select that and say ok and now I have a list of the projects in the system I can go find my well Mont b2 project the one I just adjusted click select load that back in as b2 now what I can do let's close that dialog go back to the assigned baselines and because I'm viewing the primary baseline I'm going to change this one I'm going to change it to be 2 there say ok and now we can see there's the baseline dates of the project that I just brought in you can see there that's reduced to the five-day duration so I've modified the baseline now obviously that's not a realistic example but that gives you an idea of how much control this gives us over the baseline project and how we can make changes to the baseline ordinarily that would be done through some kind of formal change control process let's go back to our original baseline so I'm now displaying the well Mont b1 the original baseline which had the original day so we get back to our normal state here and what I'm going to show you next is when this project starts to status how we start to see variants in the project so let's take a look at that now okay so here's the project we're imagining now that work has been going on for a few weeks and we've had a few delays the mobilization took a little longer than expected which is caused some general slippage throughout the project and we can see that indicated visually by the baseline bars on the Gantt chart now what I'm going to do next is I'm going to show you how to display a variance field that will quantify these delays I'm going to open this table area out little normal open will open some extra columns I'm going to right-click here open the columns dialog I'm going to go to the durations area here this is where some of the variances show up because they show up as a duration I'll show you why in a moment variants bl1 project start date that one there will tell us the number of days different plus or minus that the activity is from its baseline so I'm going to double click that let's put that down the bottom here and I'm going to take the variance project finish date as well and I can apply that and say ok I can see those fields you can see there this activity this is telling me because this is the project complete milestone that's negative 4 that's going to now happen four days later than planned and I'll see similar numbers as we work our way down with the start dates and the finish dates so that's the variance according to BL project which is as you recall if we go to assign baselines that's the project baseline so this variance because this is BL project is referring to whatever project we determined to be the project baseline in this case well Mont b1 so there you go folks that's how you manage baselines in Primavera six hope you found that helpful don't forget to visit our website ten six comm check us out we'll see you online hi there a quick message for those of you who enjoy learning by watching videos online 10-6 consulting offers a fully comprehensive Primavera p6 professional online video training course written by industry experts this course teaches you all the skills you need to get up and running as a p6 scheduler each of the lessons includes a video instruction section practical exercises and a quiz at the end to test your understanding and this course is certified by the project management institute so you'll earn PDUs at the completion of the course 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Channel: Ten Six

Views: 71,610

Rating: 4.9406309 out of 5

Keywords: Primavera P6, Baselines

Id: 5QgDaJac70M

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2016