Best way to track original dates against updated dates?

[EvanHa3]

I am a Project Manager for a small team, and in the course of our work, sometimes projects get delayed (sometimes by my team, but usually by our client). In the case of a client delay, we want to update the timeline to accommodate for the delay and adjust subsequent task dates at the point of delay. I also want the Condition to remain On Target, keeping At Risk and In Trouble reserved for delays that are on us. However, when I do that, I seem to lose track of what the original planned dates were for each task, and it would be helpful during project retrospectives to review the original dates compared to where the project finally ended.

What is the best practice for accommodating for these delays and keeping some record of what the original project task dates were?

[KellieGardner · Accepted solution]

@EvanHa3 - You can use Baseline dates for this and compare current planned vs baseline original planned. 

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/manage-work/projects/create-projects/crea...

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/reporting/reports/custom-view-samples/vie...

[EvanHa3]

Hi Kellie, thank you for that information. I see the documentation for the Baseline Report and Baseline Task Report, but it appears to me that the most I can see is the total drift between dates, is that right? Is there no way to see the actual dates from each baseline?

[KellieGardner]

@EvanHa3  Yes you can pull through the dates as well.

For tasks (baseline task report) you can pull in the "baseline" dates and then the "task" dates. 

For Projects (Baseline Report) you can pull in the baseline date and project date

[EvanHa3]

Thank you, Kellie! I think I may need to play with the Baseline Task Report to get it to display in a way that is most helpful to us, but this is a good start. 

[TimWy1]

Hey Evan,

We do the same thing with our projects to monitor and compare requested completion dates vs actual/planned completion dates. Depending on how you manage your project timelines, in order to see the actual dates you mentioned above, you could potentially pull native date fields that already exist in the project details into your report. If you schedule your projects based on the start date, you could simply put the planned completion date and the projected completion dates into columns side by side to compare. In the example below, the planned completion date is calculated by the project tasks, durations, and dependencies, and the projected completion date is being calculated using that, plus the actual current status of those tasks. So they may end up being different if someone is behind or ahead of schedule on their tasks within the project.

But if your schedule mode is based on the completion date (like 99% of our projects are), these native field dates may not reflect the info you are wanting to display. For example, if we are continually updating our planned completion dates so that our team can accurately report on their current workload, the planned and projected completion dates tend to evolve together, and we lose that "original" planned completion date. To get around that, we use a custom field in our request queue that asks what their requested completion date is, and that's what we use in our reports to compare to the anticipated completion date that could/should be regularly updated. 

I hope that helps resolve your issue, but let me know if there are any more details I can provide to get you what you need.