This is because the Planned dates are represented as bars when the is selected in the Assign Baselines form. When a Baseline has not been assigned they are used to display a Project or User Primary Baseline bar. You will find that Actual dates are changed for you to the Planned Dates without telling you! To overcome this problem you may run a Global Change to set them equal to the Start and Finish dates first.Ģ.
WHERE TO MANUALLY START PRIMAVERA P3 UPDATE
Progress Spotlight, so one does not get the expected result as one would with P3, SureTrak or MPS with update progress. I have found the Planned Dates are used in:ġ. There is a whole page of documentation in my book on how they calculate but it is all a bit academic as any normal scheduler would never want to display them or any data that is associated with them.
When an activity is unstarted they are set to the early start and early finish. When an activity is complete or in progress they are set to equal to the last update, say similar to the last periods status.Ģ. Most people do not even know that these dates even exist net alone where how they are calculated or how they are used or when! The Primavera documentation does not give a clear indication of what they do or how they calculate.ġ. I agree the “Planned Dates” are a disaster. Now that my curiosity is piqued Im going to try to track down the Primavera product guys and see what they have to say.
The workaround is to run a Global Change every single time you use Apply Actuals or Update Progress. So I havent heard any posts saying how those Planned dates can be useful, so Im going to go ahead and say that they are a botched attempt at getting people who dont save baselines to have some sort of quasi-baseline anyway, and that the behavior with respect to Apply Actuals and Update Progress resulted either from bad judgment on the part of a product developer or some sort of horrible miscommunication. If anyone needs any help understanding the behavior of the Planned dates beyond what Paul has outlined in his post, there is an excellent explanation with illustrations and exercises in the best Primavera reference book around, Project Planning and Control, by the very same Paul Harris. I couldnt agree with you more, it is critical to understand the behavior of the Planned dates. And do you use Apply Actuals or Update Progress? Dont you find it irritating that those tools overwrite your Actual Start/Actual Finish with whatever values happen to be in the Planned Start/Planned Finish fields? I mean the last thing *I* would ever think to do is overwrite actuals with anything even remotely like a baseline, otherwise at the end it looks like everything happened according to the original baseline plan and you cant derive any lessons learned or come up with more accurate estimates. So how do the Planned Start/Planned Finish come into play for you? These are not frozen like the baseline, nor are they dynamic like the Early schedule. First of all when you say Current Schedule do you mean Early Start/Finish? And when you say Baseline Schedule I think its fair to assume you mean BL Start/BL Finish or some other frozen baseline somewhere. I couldnt understand your post, but Im hoping that you know something about the usefulness of the Planned Dates that I might be missing.