Primavera P6: Earned Value and Baselines

hi this is Bill platoon managing consultant at construction science I'm going to talk a little bit about baselines today there's quite a bit of misunderstanding when it comes to baselines in Primavera p6 so I'm going to show you something that I'm hoping is fairly obvious as far as one of the potential problems you can have when setting up a baseline currently I have a schedule open that's in progress and this is where the problem will really jump out at you so we're showing some activities on the screen you can see the blue represents work in progress whereas other activities have not started yet essentially this is the fifth update on a project that we're working on right now so let's set up a baseline to do that we go up to project maintain baseline and then you click on add now what we're going to look at right now is making a copy of the current schedule and making it a baseline a perfect copy of the current schedule well why would you do that let's say you're getting ready to make some changes but you're not sure if they'll really work out we can make a complete copy of the schedule and then as we're modifying it from this point forward we can compare our changes to the baseline or if you think about it if this was the baseline schedule the original schedule on the project we could make a baseline of the baseline and then as we start modifying the current schedule to become the first update then we're referring back to these target bars which are the baseline schedule so that's another good reason for doing this now the conversion the second option is when you want to go much further back let's say we're working on the 15th update and we'd like to compare how this schedule looks with the 12th update or maybe go all the way back to day one with the original baseline schedule because we're not trying to make a copy of the current schedule we're essentially copying and attaching another schedule as our baseline that's a much different procedure I want to focus though on the first option today we're going to make a complete copy of the writ of the current schedule the fifth update so I'll click OK and we'll wait a moment and we'll see confirmation that the baseline has been created I'm not a big fan of the word baseline as it's used in Primavera p6 because I run into a constant problem communicating with people someone says to me bill I'm comparing the current schedule to the baseline well what baseline is that it could be last month's schedule two months ago it could be the original schedule on the project the word baseline has become a generic term in p6 and as a result I need people to give me more information about what schedule in particular they're referring to as the baseline alright after a brief delay you can now see that the fifth update with the extension b1 is our baseline so let's go ahead and close this out the next step is we need to tell Primavera how to find this baseline we can have more than one so we're going to label this baseline so the Primavera can identify it for us we go back to project now we go down to assign baselines and you'll see up here we have a project baseline and we have user baselines right now neither one of them is using a baseline so we're going to switch this and pick the schedule that I just created that copy but I'm also going to do it down here now this might seem weird why do I have to make the project baseline and the primary baseline the same it helps to avoid confusion there's certain settings in p6 where you can tell it to calculate off the primary baseline or to calculate off the project baseline so if you tend to flip back and forth with these settings you're not looking at the right data also no one but you will see the user baselines so I like to have my primary baseline also be the project baseline so that when I'm displaying my baseline on a Gantt chart other users are seeing the same baseline that I'm seeing on my screen because otherwise these three are exclusive to the user alright so we've set this up now Primavera knows how to identify them so let's display it that's right-click inside the Gantt chart let's go to bars and you'll see that we've got primary baseline so I could use that one or the one that's for project baseline but I'll just pick primary so now it's going to be displayed it's going to be a yellow bar certainly lots of options but I like to have it a highly contrasting color and you'll also see that I typically make it a skinny bar I don't want it to take up too much space vertically and having a different shape than some of these other bars such as the work completed which is a much fatter bar I think makes it look more distinct on the screen one last thing is I usually display the baseline on row to the primary bars will be on row 1 so in some instances the dates will overlap so it's nice to have the baseline bar below the current bar all right so we're ready to see it on the screen and keep in mind this is a perfect copy of my fifth update that's all I did I said Primavera copy my schedule so we should see no difference between the baseline bars and the current bars unless of course we start modifying the current bars but we haven't touched them yet let's go ahead and click OK and you might notice we're starting to have some problems notice especially for these activities that are in progress the target bar is not matching up let's see if we have a few more of these yes here's another one and another one typically I find that they're fine the target bar or baseline will match up for a current bar that's not in progress but you'll see these other ones don't look right at all so the question is why not I mean after all this is supposed to be nothing more than a copy of my current schedule believe it or not it's because of earn value most of us don't think of earned value as having anything to do with displaying a target bar on my screen but in fact it does change how Primavera identifies the dates for those bars so let me show you how we change this we're going to go up to admin go down to admin preferences and you'll see earn value again earn value something that most of us would think about for a cost loaded schedule but it does affect the baselines and it's this option right down here that we need to watch there's three settings the first two using add completion values or budgeted values it's hard to say that one is right versus the other if you have a project where the budgets never change then the second option here would be fine but in some instances you might want this one because you've changed budgets over the course of the project but where I was sitting initially and I did this intentionally was this one right here in another lesson will explain to you why planned dates don't mean anything in p6 once a schedule has progress planned dates are truly meaningless so if you're going to calculate baseline bars off of these fictitious planned dates you're not going to get the right information let's try this one right here budgeted values with current dates if your schedule isn't cost loaded these two settings are essentially the same let's go ahead and close this out and then let's go back in here and we're probably going to need to clear out the memory so I'm going to come back in here and I'm going to reverse the process sometimes I might have to actually delete the baseline but we're going to try this way just by going back in a moment and seeing if we can convince Primavera to find the correct settings now so I'll go back into a sign baseline and pick the current project all right doesn't look like that's going to work for us so let's go ahead and delete this baseline because the bars are clearly not correct so I'm going to back out all the way first I need to take out all references to the baseline because trying to delete a baseline while Primavera still trying to read it it's sort of like a thumb drive if you're trying to read information off a thumb drive when you pull it out of your laptop you're going to get an error message it's the same thing here we need to take out this information so Primavera does not try to access it so now I've taken out the reference to the baseline the second step here delete the baseline all together let's put this back in there the correct way if I had copied another project using the second option of convert deleting a baseline would not be a very smart option I would actually be deleting that particular schedule out of my database but because all I was doing was making a copy of a schedule deleting that copy is not a problem so this time we'll come in we'll make another copy and this should take just a moment now you'll notice still yellow bars on my screen why are there yellow yellow bars because Primavera still is trying to display some sort of baseline because that option has been selected but when we come in this time and we re-establish the baseline using the correct earned value settings then the bars will make sense all right we've got that part taken care of let's go back to project assign baselines and once again the primary and the project baseline will be the same schedule problem solved you can see that the yellow bars for these activities in progress match up exactly with the current bars above them these gaps right here you probably know are indicative of out of sequence work meaning that there's a predecessor to this activity as well as to the one above it that's not complete yet and that remaining duration is carrying through but the length of the target bar or baseline as we now have to call it is exactly correct so keep in mind if you don't check your own value settings these baseline bars could be completely meaningless I hope you enjoyed this lesson if you'd like to know more about Primavera p6 and some of the training options that we have feel free to give me a call or visit us at Primavera scheduling comm and you can find about some of our other services at construction science comm I hope to hear from you thank you

Channel: Bill Pepoon

Views: 130,177

Rating: 4.8035364 out of 5

Keywords: Primavera P6, Baselines, Earned Value

Id: vR_RLypQElk

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2013