Hi

I've been watching various videos about these two topics and have the steps you'd carry out to set up baselining or change the status date.

From what I understand, if I have it correctly, without the baseline it's not possible to set up indicators (as they'd have nothing to calculate against if you didn't) and status date is changed so that the project re-jigs (highly technical term, do excuse) and subsequent tasks, if affected, are moved along if needed.

1. If entering a new status date, what's the behavior? Does it extend the end date of the project or keep the existing planned end date, does it re-plan the whole project or just the tasks directly affected?
2. How do you know which tasks it's moved other than painstaking visual review of the Gantt (and thus trying to work out if you've booked a resource to start on a particular day, how would you know whether you had to delay their start by a week for example)?
3. How would you use status date - as a PM I mean. I'm trying to figure out the triggers (routine and reactive) that might be the points at which you'd change the status date and really what its purpose is and the reasoning behind when you'd do it. So for instance, if you have a weekly meeting for a particular project where you monitor progress etc, would you do a status update during/before the meeting and then discuss it? If that's not the right way to use it, what other reactive triggers would there be - each time it's a milestone day or approaching end of phase or 5 resources have gone off sick. I guess whilst I can see what you do I'm not quite understanding how you use it in practical terms, as an aid to project management
4. Also re the fact you can have up to 11 baselines (which presumably are almost like timestamps/'version history' of your baselining activities) how do you use re-baselining if you're doing status date changes - what's the correlation between the two (if that makes sense).

Any help or direction to articles/help which sets this out a bit more (or direct replies on here from folk that know about these things) gratefully received. Thank you.