Here's the scenario: You are building a schedule for a project that has a planned duration about three months. You are not concerned about project costs so you will not be doing EV. You are developing the schedule ensuring that your work packages are linked to represent your planned sequencing and all of your packages are fixed duration. Once complete, you baseline the schedule and you have a good representation of your current critical path.
During execution, maybe you are 30% complete from a time perspective, you update the schedule with progress (assume you have a valid and credible way of capturing work complete). The project finish date is starting to show an unfavorable finish variance, adding about 1.5 weeks to the three month project. You estimate work remaining and, due to some changes in the way you do the work and other interventions, you estimate that you can shave off the finish variance and actually come in sooner than planned with a favorable variance of four days.
Do you alter the durations of the remaining work packages based on your latest revised estimate, allowing the schedule to calculate a finish that shows the favorable finish variance?
If so, do you process the change in duration through your change control or do you consider duration something outside of what is baselined?
Or, do you keep your original baselined duration the same and show in another way your latest revised estimate and the resulting finish date? If so, how?