Adding New Task After Setting Baseline

Kaleb

Smartsheet Community:

Once The Baseline is Set. It Would Be Nice to Have The Ability to Add New Tasks and for those Tasks to be Added to The Baseline without Re-Setting it.

Today, I have to Manual Change All the Dates. This Drastically Increase human Errors and is Very Time Consuming.

Michael Foster

When you have set the baseline feature (which we love) you aren't able to apply it for any subsequent rows that you add without resetting it for the whole sheet. This isn't desirable as you effect the baselining for all previous amendments. Ideally you would be able to individually set / reset baseline for the row by right clicking Set Baseline / Reset Baseline.

Richard Heath

I have come up against this too. The Baseline feature is really useful, however, it has less impact when new tasks don't have the Baseline applied, meaning our Project Managers rely less and less on it.

Paulo Ferrer

I work with numerous projects and teams geographically distributed across the globe. I really like to use the project baseline, but it is necessary to reset right after the first planning. It would be very interesting to be able to have an automation that would allow the baseline to be reset.

Tks!

Arundhati

What date would you like the new task to reflect - the date you added it? Start date of the project? Or other date? I have run into this issue in the past as well where I set the baseline and then need to add new task(s).

I am sure Smartsheet can find a solution to this. But on a separate note maybe from a PM perspective after you set certain tasks to be your baseline i.e. your scope anything new you add will require you to revise the scope/baseline?

Kaleb

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/348425#Comment_348425

Yes, but I don't want to Re-Set The Entire Baseline because it will then be On Track. The Additional Scope Added Should Factored into The Existing Baseline. Therefore, the Scope Change shoes the True Impact to The Existing Schedule

Arundhati

Got it. I agree with you, I have run into a similar situation too and would love for the baseline function to be updated.

Matthew Zizzi

Same, this is a critical requirement for the usefulness of Baselines, It was a basic feature of MS Project since 2003 so I'm a bit baffled that an 'all or nothing' approach has been taken to updating baselines in a sheet nearly a decade later. The only work around is to create a copy of the sheet, update the lines then recopy over the old start and end dates to keep the variance. I might as well start the entire document over from scratch in MS Project and spend the time importing the file for reports to departments requiring the Smartsheet interface, using Smartsheet as a glorified Google Drive. This is a major Flaw that needs to be addressed.

Nimrod Notea

Voted it up

I wanted to add that what I would be looking for with the Baselines is the ability to set a range, even confined to a minimum of 1 row (rather than a range of cells) for which I can set the baseline.

Another thing I'd appreciate is if the baseline can be edited by the sheet's owner/admin. It's cool that as a place to start with, the baseline is taken from the current start and finish columns by default, but it would be great to be able to edit it afterwards in case the deadline date to start or finish is earlier or later than the start / finish respectively are.

For example, a certain project is to start on a Monday, and end on a Thursday - Baselines are born with the same values, but in terms of when the project can realistically end, we'd want to amend the Baseline end to Friday!

V Parraga

I would say the majority of our project does not have a baseline due to this gap in the baseline feature. Our schedules evolve as we identify sub tasks or additional work that can be accepted with extra capacity. We rely on the base line to assess how we are doing compared to the original date entered, but can't do that for 65% of our tasks

Cheryl Ferraro

I would like the baseline function to be updated as well. We have a Mastersheet that we are constantly adding new projects to and want to use the baseline to see what part of the project is causing delays. If I need to reset the baselines every time I add a new project, it will either have incorrect information for all other projects that were previously on the sheet, or I have to manually change the dates (which would be extremely time consuming).

MAL_CAPTAIN803

I work with projects which start with a minimal scope of work, which then grows dynamically.

Once I have entered the original scope of work, I can create a baseline - OK.

However, when I add new tasks to the project, I simply want to add them to the existing baseline and set planned start / end dates / Duration and actual start / end dates / duration. - without having to reset the entire baseline.

It would be nice to have option to update entire baseline (traditional style) OR update only tasks which do not have an assigned baseline.

ana_outset

I am amazed by the few votes this has received. Most of the project managers in my organization either don't use this feature or are frustrated by this gap in the baseline functionality. It's been a basic feature in Microsoft Project since 2013, and I can't believe Smartsheet is unable to offer it.

Veronica Velez

Voted for it! I have a workaround meantime, which is adding 2 new columns:

• New Baseline: with the formula =End@row
• Diff: with the formula =IF(Var@row = "", ([New Baseline]@row - End@row), Var@row)

So, the "Diff" column is the recalculated "Var" column, which will calculate the variance from the new task if the "Var" column is blank, otherwise, it will bring the "Var" column value.

Hopefully, it makes sense :)

Kaleb

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/394734#Comment_394734

Can You Copy and Share The Sheet So I can See Visually and Try it?

Veronica Velez

@Kaleb here it is: https://app.smartsheet.com/sheets/vX8g5HXPjj22Mq9VGfHXWCFXrHRhr4wcmQw47971

For the:

• New Baseline: with the formula =End@row

I actually changed it to manually add the data manually as soon as the new task is added, otherwise, it will keep updating everytime I change the end date.

In this example, activities 5 & 6 have been added after setting the baseline. Original end date was 09/25 (as stated in New Baseline column) and then I changed it to 09/27. After that, "Diff" column is either picking up the original Variance from the Var column or calculating whenever it is blank.