Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Saving the Project Plan

Once you obtain the stakeholders’ approval, it’s time to save an official, approved version of your project plan. This approved plan wears a lot of hats during the life of your project. It’s documentation of the agreed-upon scope, schedule, budget, and so on; when questions arise later, you can turn to the approved plan to help sort them out. The project plan also acts as a reference for the project team as they do their work. Finally, the project plan contains the targets you’ve set for the project. As the team performs the project work, you compare actual performance to the plan to see whether you’re on the right track. But first you have a few final planning tasks to complete. A plan is merely a proposed plan until the stakeholders accept it and commit their approval in writing.

A project plan covers a lot of ground, and it isn’t stored in a single file. Saving a project plan means saving an approved copy of every file that contributes to the plan. This chapter talks about setting up a storage system not only for the planning documents, but also for files generated during the rest of the project’s life. You’ll learn about different ways to store project files and how to structure project information so it’s easy to find and manage.

For some types of files, saving a copy is as simple as appending v1.0 to the end of the filename, but Project files require more attention. This chapter describes how to set a baseline in your Project schedule so you ...