Comparing plan to baseline at date x, howto?

[Guest]

Hi,

a couple of months ago, I have planned my project and saved a
baseline. In the meantime some new tasks have been added and the
baseline updated. On a weekly basis, I enter actual hours and
remaining hours per task and resource. So far so good. Now, I'm
interested in some form of trend.

My understanding is that work is the sum of actual work and remaining
work and may change over time. On a time line ...

Start (6 months ago)>-----X------Y-----> Today

I can see work today and at start of the project (baseline work). Can
I somehow see what work was at dates X or Y? Setting the status date
to X did not help me ;-) Or is there any other form of seeing trends
in my project with the available data?

Thanks in advance,
Stefan.

PS: I've already checked Mike's excellent tutorials and
http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm to no avail.

 

[John]

Hi,

a couple of months ago, I have planned my project and saved a
baseline. In the meantime some new tasks have been added and the
baseline updated. On a weekly basis, I enter actual hours and
remaining hours per task and resource. So far so good. Now, I'm
interested in some form of trend.

My understanding is that work is the sum of actual work and remaining
work and may change over time. On a time line ...

Start (6 months ago)>-----X------Y-----> Today

I can see work today and at start of the project (baseline work). Can
I somehow see what work was at dates X or Y? Setting the status date
to X did not help me ;-) Or is there any other form of seeing trends
in my project with the available data?

Thanks in advance,
Stefan.

PS: I've already checked Mike's excellent tutorials and
http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm to no avail.

Stefan,
One simple thing that comes to mind is to display the Cumulative Work
field in the timescaled data, (right side), of the Resource or Task
Usage views. You can then pick a particular date and see what the total
work was and compare it to the baseline.

I don't know of any built in field or function that will help you with
trends, but a VBA procedure could be developed that takes the cumulative
data at certain points, compares it to the baseline and then develops a
graph for trend analysis. The data would need to be exported to Excel
for the trend analysis.

Years ago I did something similar with our earned value performance. I
developed an algorithm that took earned value past performance and
projected it forward for a few months to predict whether performance was
likely to get better, worse or come in on plan.

John
Project MVP