Microsoft Planner has a new feature! It’s capable of capturing a baseline. I covered the feature in a recent video on YouTube. It’s a feature available only for premium plans. And there’s more to the feature than meets the eye. Let’s dig in!
Product feature marketing style.
The product is Microsoft Planner. And the new feature we are showcasing is the baseline.”
Oh my, AI… Are you feeling alright? This image just looks horribly wrong. How is this a marketing style product feature image? And what is a Baselase🤷♂️?
The baseline we see
As shown in the first part of the video. The baseline we do see, is on a project level. It shows the overall timeframe of the project, it’s start and finish dates. And it has the duration and effort included.
When I create the new baseline, I just need to press the baseline button shown above and click the create button. The best feature of this baseline, compared to the Microsoft Project baselines is the fact that we can change the name of the baseline!
Changes to the duration or it’s start, and end dates will reflect on the baseline status text.
I changed the baseline start date in both examples above. However, it doesn’t show that in the image above. It doesn’t give me the “3 days plus indicator” on the baseline start.
And that’s it.
The baseline we don’t see
If I alter effort (or duration for that matter) there’s no indication on the top about this change, and I don’t see the change reflected next to Baseline effort.
There isn’t a “Tracking Gantt” view on the timeline page either. I also know where I’d like it to be for that matter:
And there’s another thing we don’t get with the current baseline feature. There aren’t multiple baselines. It’s “just the one”. And you will need to remove it and add a new baseline in case you want to rebaseline your project.
There’s a couple of issues I have with just 1 baseline, but you might already be familiar with them if you read my previous article about baselines.
The hidden baseline feature
Microsoft mentioned that the baseline shows project level values. But it actually does capture task level changes as well.
The plans from Planner Premium, are all stored in the Dataverse. Meaning that we can create a new plan using that interface and see what we can find in the tables:
Now let’s look under the hood and find out if we can actually see some baseline task information. But let’s also make some small changes, because I’m curious to know if I’ll find variance data as well.
From the Make.powerapps.com site, I navigate to the tables tab and search for “Project”. Then make sure to select the All option on top to see the Project and task baseline tables!
Now that I know that these tables are here, I wanted to add them to the app and see what views they have, and if I could change the views to show all content. But there was something hindering me in editing views this time:
But at least there’s the Dataverse baseline I created earlier remember?
And there’s information about the tasks as well here:
Looking at all the columns we have in the Project baseline table does show an interesting thing, the effort and duration varience fields are there:
So, let’s take a look at all the fields we have in the tasks table as well:
Ok, the basics are all here. But I didn’t find a reference to resources or assignments yet. Maybe that’s something on the backlog. But this is at least promising for some nice reports. Let’s give it a try.
How to report on the Baseline in Planner
Accessing Dataverse tables is easy with Power BI. And I believe we should capture a list of tables for this task. I’d like to grab the “Project” (or plan, because it’s no longer a project according to Microsoft), “Project Task”, “Project Baseline Data” and “Project Baseline Task Data” tables.
With Power BI I can connect to the Dataverse environment and select tables I’d like to add as well. But then I got a nasty surprise, the tables related to baselines aren’t available in Power BI.
There isn’t even a reference to baselines that I can hook on to:
Final notes
That was a nasty final test to leave this post with. And I really do hope Microsoft will improve the Baseline features of Planner Premium. There is such a good reference application available to them, called Microsoft Project. I have hinted before in the article that Microsoft seems to brush away the term project from the product though.
If that’s the case, where should we go for proper project management? Are we left with third party applications such as our own Power PPM?
There are upsides to this approach, but I would have liked a fledged out Power Platform based Project solution from Microsoft. That could then integrate with our solution and we would get best of both worlds.
Baseline(s) in Planner Premium isn’t “there” yet. And I hope Microsoft sees this as well. I really hope we can see improvements to the baseline feature in the near future.
Thanks for reading another TPC article. Connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to talk/discuss the topic some more.