As you make changes to your schedule, you might want to consider rescheduling remaining work to start as of a particular date so that you can get things back on track in your schedule. You can quickly and easily reschedule any remaining work for partially completed or uncompleted tasks using the Update Project dialog box (see 12-8). Start by displaying any task-oriented view. If you plan to update only selected tasks, select them by clicking their ID numbers. Then on the Tools menu, point to Tracking, and click Update Project.

Figure 12-8. You can quickly and easily reschedule uncompleted work.

The Reschedule Uncompleted Work To Start After option reschedules the remaining portions of uncompleted tasks; Project uses the date that you select as the starting date for the remaining work. By selecting the day before you plan to resume work on uncompleted tasks, you ensure that Project doesn’t schedule any remaining work for partially completed tasks for dates that have already passed.

Project reschedules partially completed tasks and tasks that have not yet started by setting a Start No Earlier Than constraint using the date you selected. When you reschedule a partially completed task, Project automatically splits the task between the completed portion and the remaining portion. If the completed portion of the task finished sometime before the remaining portion is scheduled to start, you see a split task on the chart portion of the Gantt Chart view.

If your organization uses Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 and Project Professional, you can use the same technique to reschedule uncompleted work from a previous reporting period into the current reporting period after you process task updates from the Updates page in Microsoft Office Project Web Access into the project plan. As the project manager, start Project Professional and log into Project Server. Then in Project Professional, open the project containing work you want to reschedule. On the Tools menu, point to Tracking, and click Update Project to display the Update Project dialog box. Select the Reschedule Uncompleted Work To Start After option, select a starting date for the remaining work, and select either the Entire Project option or the Selected Tasks option. Click OK; after Project reschedules uncompleted work, on the File menu, click Publish to update the project stored in the Project Server database.

You also might want to consider setting a new baseline at this point so that you can later compare information from your original baseline, your new baseline, and actual progress information; the comparison process helps you learn from your experience. The baseline, as I described in 8, stores a snapshot of your project at the time you save it. If you decide to set a new baseline, meet with your team and other project stakeholders and explain why you’ve decided to set a new baseline so that everyone involved is aware of the new baseline starting point.

To set a new baseline, on the Tools menu, point to Tracking, and click Save Baseline. In the Set Baseline dialog box that appears (see 12-9), in the Set Baseline list, click one of the baselines you haven’t yet set. That way, you can preserve the original baseline. Click OK to save the new baseline.

Figure 12-9. Select a baseline you haven’t used to store new baseline information.