There’s a new P6 baseline update preview feature in P6 Professional release 24.12. Let’s take a look at it and demonstrate how it works.
One difficulty with the P6 Professional baseline update tool is confirming the changes a particular setting has made to your schedule’s baseline. This necessitates careful inspection of the activity table and Gantt chart after executing the baseline updates.
The update baseline dialog in P6 Professional release 24.12 has a new look and includes a preview with a panel that lists each target object and the change type. The object panel displays dropdown trees for Project, WBS, and Activities and branches for prospective changes to each. In this way, schedulers are sure of the baseline modifications before implementation.
This article investigates and demonstrates modifications to the P6 baseline update preview tool.
Figure 1 shows our demonstration project work breakdown structure (WBS).
Figure 1
This WBS has a Site Restoration deliverable but no Substantial Completion, Figure 1. The accompanying activity table and Gantt chart are displayed in Figure 2.
Figure 2
We want to make several updates to the schedule, including adding a Substantial Completion deliverable, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3
Figure 4 displays the respective activity table and Gantt chart with these schedule modifications.
Figure 4
We inserted two activities: New Activity and Project Closeout, Figure 4. We also made several changes to the activity relationships to reflect the Substantial Completion deliverable and Project Closeout effort.
After making these changes, we found that the New Activity and Project Closeout tasks have blank BL Project Start and BL Project Finish dates. These baseline fields will need to be populated. Further, the Gantt chart also has no yellow baseline bar for these tasks. We must update the baseline to reflect the additional tasks and activity relationships changes.
Another update was in the Enterprise Project Structure (EPS), where we added a User Defined Field (UDF) delivery date of April 2, 2025, to the project, Figure 5.
Figure 5
We also want this UDF addition reflected in the baseline.
Figure 6 shows how to proceed with the baseline updates by clicking the Update button in the maintain baselines dialog box.
Figure 6
In Figure 6, we selected our target baseline, whose name ends in B1, and then clicked update. In Figure 7, we click General and toggle Project UDFs to track updates to these fields.
Figure 7
In Figure 8, we click Activities and toggle or confirm the following: Add, Delete, and Update activities settings.
Figure 8
We then click Activity, Figure 9, and update activity information by including General activity information, Relationships, and WBS assignments.
Figure 9
We also toggled off Steps, Figure 9. This was done because the preview indicated Step updates to the Mobilize activity when there were none. (I assess that this is likely a bug in the P6 r24.12 update.) We clicked the preview button to display a summary of these prospective updates, Figure 9. The resulting preview is displayed in Figure 10.
Figure 10
On the left is the object panel, with tree branches for Project, WBS, and Activities. With Project selected in the object panel, the right side shows the differences between the project and baseline values. The current data date is February 11, while the baseline was January 1st. The current finish date is April 4th, versus an initial baseline finish of March 26th. If we had added a must-finish-by date, another row would compare the project and baseline deadlines.
If we select the User Define Fields in the object panel, Figure 11, we see our Delivery Date UDF, which we assigned to our project in the EPS, Figure 5.
Figure 11
The object panel on the left also indicates the addition of a new WBS, code 4, Figure 12 (we do not show the WBS details in the figure).
Figure 12
Task W1030 Project Complete shows several relationship deletions and the addition of a W1180 finish-to-finish (FF) relationship connecting to W1030. The preview also shows the addition of W1142 and its finish-to-start (FS) predecessor, W1140. When we select the W1140 predecessor, we find in the list of fields on the right that it has a four-day lag, Figure 12.
Finally, we have the addition of W1180 and all its predecessors. The preview update looks good, so we can proceed with the baseline update, as shown in Figure 13.
Figure 13
After the update concludes, click the Refresh Data button or F5. The final current schedule and baseline appear in Figure 14.
Figure 14
Summary
The P6 baseline update preview tool in the latest release (r24.12) has new dialog boxes for setting the baseline update parameters.
The most helpful feature is the P6 baseline update preview, which lists each project, deliverable and task object modification. Its advantage is its pre-update review before making the baseline changes. The update log file provides other high-level information that can be used to further check the correctness of the baseline updates.