Baselining Your Project in

Primavera P6
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 Baselining Your Project in Primavera P6
Welcome back to PMTutor e-learning course! You have made it to the 12th Lesson –
Baselining Your Project in P6. In this lesson, you will learn about Baselines and how to use
them to evaluate your project’s progress. You will learn to create a baseline and assign it to
your project and you will also learn about configuring the Gantt chart to display your
baseline graphically.
A Baseline is like a snapshot of your project plan, frozen at a point in time. This “snapshot”
provides a target against which you can track your project’s cost, schedule, and recourse
performance. We use baselines to help us evaluate whether our project is following the
plan we set out to follow. Your project plan will change as you execute the work it
describes, some activities will start later than expected, some will finish early, some will be
changed completely. But the baseline will not change – it preserves for you the original
plan. You can then compare your evolved plan with the original plan (your baseline) to
evaluate your project’s performance.
Ok. Now that we understand the concept of a Baseline, let’s create a baseline for our MFE
project shown here. As we move through the steps, you will see that Primavera offers you
many options for working with baseline, let’s start by taking a snapshot of the MFE project
as you see it here. Click on the Project menu.

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 Baselining Your Project in Primavera P6
Select Maintain Baselines from the menu.
The Maintain Baselines window comes up. From this window, you can create baselines
for your project. Infact, Primavera let’s you create multiple baselines or snapshots of your
project, allowing you lots of flexibility. Let’s create a baseline now. Click the Add button to
create a new baseline.
P6 gives you lots of options for creating baselines. This dialog box is asking you whether
you would like to create a baseline from the current project or if you would prefer to create
a baseline from another project in your database. Lets stick with creating a baseline for the
current project. Click the OK button to create your baseline from the current project.
You will notice the new baseline shows up in the list under the name of your project. Also
notice how Primavera names your baseline – it’s essentially the name of your project with a
“B1” attached to the end. Let’s give your new baseline a more descriptive name. type “Base
1: MFE project” in the white box labeled Baseline Name. press ENTER when you are
done.
Good. Now click on the Baseline Type dropdown list to expand the list.

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 Baselining Your Project in Primavera P6
Primavera let’s you categorize your baselines to describe their purpose. If you were
working with many baseline on a project, this becomes a very handy feature. For example,
if your baseline was approved by management, you could assign it the category
“Management Sign-Off” to help you remember. Let’s assign the category “Initial Planning
Baseline” to the baseline. Choose “Initial Planning Baseline” from the dropdown list to
assign it tothe baseline.
Great! You have created a new baseline or snapshot of the project. The next step is to assign
this snapshot to the project for comparison. Let’s keep moving. Click the Close button to
close the window.
Click on the Project menu.
Select Assign Baselines from the menu.
Using the Assign Baselines window, you can assign one or multiple baselines to your
project for comparison. Primavera actually let’s you assign up to 4 snapshots
simultaneously. This is a very flexible approach. Let’s assign the baseline you created as a
Project Baseline. Click the Project Baseline dropdown list to expand the list.
Select “Base 1: MFE project” from the list.

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 Baselining Your Project in Primavera P6
Good, now let’s explore the different dropdown lists on this screen. At the top, we have
Project Baseline. When you assign a baseline as a Project Baseline, that baseline is
assigned for all users working on the project – consider it a Global baseline for the project
that all users will see. However, P6 allows you to assign up to 3 private baselines or User
Baselines for your project. The User Baselines you set are only shown for you and not
other user working on the project. User Baseline are optional to use, but can be very handy
to compare your project’s performance against more than one baseline at a time. Let’s keep
moving forward. Click the OK button to assign the baseline and return to your project.
The last step is working with baseline, the next step is to graphically display the baseline
on your Gantt chart. The Gantt chart can be configured to display an additional set of Bars
representing your Project Baseline. So, it’s time to dive into learning how to configure the
bars on your Gantt chart. Click on the Layout Options Bar to expand the menu
Select Bars from the menu
The Bars window is for configuring your Gantt chart. Here you can see a list of different
bars that can be displayed on the Gantt. Each can be turned on or off. You will notice a few
entries relating to baselines in the list. You will be turning on 2 entries – one for activities
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 Baselining Your Project in Primavera P6
and one for milestones. Click to place a checkmark in the box next to “Primary Baseline”.
This turns on the baselines bars for baseline activities.
Good. Click to place a checkmark in the box next to “Milestone”. This turns on the
baselines bars for baseline milestones. Click Apply
Click on OK to close the window and to check out your Gantt chart.
Have you noticed the new yellow bars on your Gantt chart? Those are the baseline bars
you just configured. These bars help you to visually determine whether your project is on
track or behind schedule. As you move into executing you project plan, your baseline bars
will remain fixed in placed while the upper bars will reflect your project’s actual dates. On
the next screen you can see what your plan will look like in the execution phase.
Nice work! You are now a Master at working with Baseline in Primavera P6. This lesson
took you in detail into creating a new baseline, assigning it to your project, and then
displaying it on your Gantt chart.

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