Baseline your schedule

What is a baseline schedule?
It is the target to aim for! It is recommended to have the baseline unchanged through out the project, unless an approved change request demands a change.

What does the scheduler do when I do a baseline?
Once baselined, baseline version of a schedule contains only five task-related fields - baseline start, baseline end, baseline duration, baseline work and baseline cost. Apart from this resource and assignment related fields are also baselined.

How many baselines are supported in MS Project 2003?
You can have a maximum of 11 baselines and 10 interim plans.

What is an interim plan? It sounds like, only some fields are copied but it is not a baseline.
Certainly yes. Interim plans (Start1/Finish1 through Start10/Finish10) can contain only start and finish date fields. You can copy a set into any other set ant any time. Warning! don’t copy to your current schedule, as it affects duration and work fields.

How to baseline my current schedule?
1. Choose Tools, Tracking, Save Baseline. The Save Baseline dialog appears.
2. If this is your first baseline, then choose Save Baseline and click OK button 3. If you have changed your schedule due to an approved change, then
3a. Select Save Interim Plan and select under Copy the current Baseline and under Into the next available set of baseline fields. If this is your first revision, then it would be Baseline1.
3b. Click OK button; now the current date on which you copied the baseline is captured in the name of the baseline.
3c. Now select the tasks affected by the change request in Gantt table. These can be:
> Newly inserted tasks
> Dependency change on existing tasks
> Change in duration, work, start date and end date of existing tasks
3d. Repeat step 1.
3e. Select the option For: Selected tasks
3f. Under Roll up baselines, check the two options To all summary tasks and From subtasks into selected summary tasks.
3g. Click OK button.

What does To all summary tasks and From subtasks into selected summary tasks indicated in step 3f mean?
To all summary tasks: Check this option to update baseline information on all the higher-level summary tasks of the detail tasks selected.

From subtasks into selected summary tasks: Check this option to update only the summary tasks that you selected.

If Review Design document detailed task end date is changed due to approved change request which inturn affects its Design summary task end date, then select the Review Design document task and check To all summary tasks to ask MS Project to recalculate the start date and end date of all summary tasks containing this detailed tasks.

If you have not checked both the options, then the selected Review Design document detailed task will only be baselined without affecting its summary task. After baselinining, you can correct it by selecting the affected summary task, say Design, and baselining again with From subtasks into selected summary tasks checked.