I want to show project actual vs. baseline performance, for a project that was not managed well in CA PPM. Project consists of a few tasks with actual hours booked. Allocations were developed, but not input to CA PPM (alas, Excel....). Actuals have exceeded the allocated hours forecasted in Excel - otherwise, this wouldn't be an issue.
I've successfully input these Excel allocations into the project in CA PPM (Created three new tasks, assigned roles, removed the tilde from "effort" task, set ETC's to zero on old tasks, assigned the allocation hours to the roles assigned to the tasks, set allocations from estimates - viola! Good, so far.)
Now, I need to baseline these new tasks which contain my original forecast from Excel. Once baselined, I can set ETC to zero on these new tasks, to show that my actuals have overrun the original forecast - this is the reality of this project.
Unfortunately, it appears CA did a really good job of preventing anyone from cheating their baselines:
- creating baseline in CA PPM - no way to do this without actual hours baselined
- editing baseline in MS Project (delete baseline work, delete tasks, create baseline only for selected tasks,.....) and then saving to CA PPM - no way to do this - CA PPM always appears to figure out that you've cheated and won't save your MS Project cheats
- even tried to use a 'journal entry' task with negative hours to offset the actual hours when baselining - but MSP won't accept negative hours on a task
Of course, the lesson hear is to do it right, right from the beginning.
But my customer wants to see what could have been seen had the project been run properly in CA PPM. We know this project had issues, we have the data in various spots, but not all in CA PPM - if it were there, what would it have shown the project manager and his management and when?
Basically, I need some kind of administrative workaround that let's me ignore actual hours already booked when inputting the baseline that should have been there from the start of the project.
One workaround, would be to create a new project with just the forecast in it, baseline it, then set ETC to zero and attach the original as a child project. But most of the out of the box portlets and reports don't support this parent/child roll-up/comparison.
Another workaround is to put the allocated hours and costs into a Cost Plan, submit it as Budget - I know this quite well. This is actually part of our plan and I know this works - but, it doesn't help with the WBS based metrics
Any ideas?