Incorporating Best and Worst case start and end dates into a project

Natalie Hellmer

Modeling the best and worst case scenarios for project timelines is often a necessity. Currently I'm duplicating the start, end and duration columns in project to have 1 set that represents best case and a second set to represent worst case. Then I change the Project settings to flip between these two sets of date data.

I then create two reports - one to pull in the best case dates and the other worst case dates.

This works well EXCEPT - the report only displays accurate information when the project setting align with the dates used in the report and when you flip between date sets in the project settings there are often a few adjustments needed to get everything aligned again.

Is there a better way?

BullandKhmer

Use the baselines feature to set up multiple baselines: best case, worst case and expected. Write out the best case scenario, set a baseline, then write out the worst case scenario and set another baseline, finally set up an expected schedule and set another baseline.

Only the last setup baseline will track against schedule, but you could easily build some additional metric columns to track actual vs best and worst.