What the heck is a Baseline Snapshot?
Certainly this is a new term for Project Managers.
You may be familiar with the concept of "baselining" in which a project's
data is stored so that you
can compare what actually happens (also called the "track"), during a project
with what you
thought would happen when you planned it.
You typically store a "baseline" so that you could later see how the time
and monetary budget
have shifted from the budgeted to the actual.
Once you have baseline data, one could write simple formulas such as the following...
1. To calculate simple error you could use the formula:
Actual Value - Budgeted Value
2. To calculate percentage of error, you could use the formula:
(Actual Value - Budgeted Value) / Budgeted
Value * 100
Why Multiple Baselines?
Now, typically programs like Microsoft Project and WBS systems store a single baseline,
but
experience in managing real-world projects has shown that projects don't have one single lifecycle,
their plan typically gets redesigned several times along the way, so if you honestly want to track a
project and calculate how budgetted vs actual changes over time, then the only real way you can
trace and see what's happening in a project is "multiple baselines".
How does it work?
To use the baseline snapshot feature, once you're confident your plan is "sound"...click
the little
camera icon
and
a spreadsheet will be created that stores all the values for that project. This
spreadsheet is named "Snapshot1", "Snapshot2"...etc.. depending on how many times
you click
the camera.In this way you can do useful things such as pressing it once per month to store the
"monthly
project state". One idea of how to use multiple snapshots would be to use the "Export All"
feature
it to export all Snapshots to Excel and then use Excel's analysis tools to graphs changes in
budget.
To view the snapshot
Click the
film strip icon 
to
see Snapshot1, then use the tab strip on the bottom to select the
particular snapshot you'd like to view.To delete a snapshot
Follow the procedure above to view the snapshot sheet you want, then click View->Delete
Snapshot. A dialog will ask you if you really want to do this. Click YES and the sheet
will be
removed.
Simple example of using a Snapshot in a Grid Formula
Step 1 -
Take a snapshot of your project.
Step 2 -
Go to the Project tab and select every item in the Duration Column.
Step 3 -
Go Sheet1 and PasteLink all the items into a row.
Step 4 -
Now manually edit them (click on the red square!) to show a simple error
calculation. For example if one cell contains the formula =Project!B1, then edit the formula
to show =Project!B1-Snapshot1!B1
Step 5 -
For each cell, change the cell type to "number". Each cell should show 0.00 now.
Now...go to your Task view or Project grid and change the duration value you're comparing.
Pop
back to Sheet1 and you'll see the error difference between actual "tracked" value.
Using a similar technique you might instead show the percentage of error...
or any other
comparison operation you dream up as being of relevance to your project.
