Added by Zehra Mehdi about 6 years ago
I am looking for a feature that is similar to one in MS Project. The ability to see in Gantt charts - both the baseline start and finish and actual start and finish. Is there a way to accomplish this in OpenProject?
Replies (3)
I have not used MS Project before.
What is a "baseline" start/finish, vs an "actual" start/finish?
Is there a moment near the end of the planning stage (for a given scope of work), where the start/end dates for that scope of work become "official", and are treated as baselines?
Yes, you got it! Say for instance, we estimated a certain task to start on a specific day and finish in 10 days, but in reality to started 2 days late, and took 12 days instead. I am looking at options to compare the actuals to the baselines to determine how far we drifted off and dig into possible causes - this would help in future planning.
Yup, I can see how such a thing might be useful in certain situations, particularly if there is a well-defined "kickoff" ceremony, where the plan becomes "anchored" to start on a specific day and finish on a specific day.
When you initially create a task in OP and give it a start and end date, they are very flexible, you can update them just by dragging handles on the Gantt chart, so at some point you would have to say "I'm done writing the plan, we're now moving into executing the plan" -- this would be perhaps the kickoff ceremony.
I haven't seen anything in OP that represents this "kickoff" or "anchoring" event, so I don't think that the feature you are describing is possible (unless such a "kickoff" event feature is added).
But I could be wrong...I'm new here, and I'm not using all of the modules for my org.