I have recently started a new role, and there are several issues with systems that i am trying to get to the bottom of....one of them is the Project Baseline functionality within P6.
When a baseline is taken and assigned as the project baseline, the planned activity Start / Finish dates for activities not yet started are reflected in the Baseline Project Start / Baseline Project Finish columns, as you would expect.
However for activities in progress or complete, these Baseline Project Start / Finish columns become populated with spurious dates, and the planned dates start to get populated against some of the other baseline date columns.
For example:
- Activity not started –No issue. Baseline Project S/F dates align with planned dates, and remain static.
- Activity in progress - Activity actual start date is reflected in BL Project Actual Start Column, Planned end date is reflected in BL Project Early Finish column. BL Project Start / BL Project Finish dates populated with spurious dates
- Activity complete –Activity Actual start and actual finish dates reflected in BL Project Actual Start / BL Project Actual Finish Columns. BL Project Start / BL Project Finish dates populated with spurious dates.
In items 2 & 3 above, it appears that the BL Project Start date that goes against the activity is typically Actual Start + 1 week (but not always), and the BL Project Finish date equates to the Actual start plus the original activity duration.
This is not typically what I’m used to - BL Project Start /BL Project Finish dates are the ones reflective of planned dates irrelevant of the status of the activity. Essentially means that i can;t baseline anything at the moment as my data is flying between 5 or 6 columns and as a result the gannt chart bar for baseline is useless.
Is this being cause by something in the P6 overall settings? I’ve had a look and there is nothing obvious to me to explain why this is happening!
Thanks :)