What Is a Project Baseline And Why Is It Important?

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This provides an overview of the project from a current, baseline and actual plan perspective. When you set a baseline the contents of the current schedule fields are copied to the baseline fields. As we can see here there is currently no difference between them at the moment. The Actuals fields are NA because what is baseline in project management no actual progress has been recorded for this project as yet. This is what you’ll measure progress against to identify issues like the all-too-common scope creep. If, for instance, the project’s scope results in longer timelines and higher costs than expected, you may need to adjust the project itself.

Why are project baselines important?

Without a baseline, you have nothing to measure your spending against and control costs. Few things are more important than cost management when managing a project. Baseline project plans quite often need to be updated, through changes to schedule, deliverables or budget. When your project is over, you can compare actual performance against your baselines to see how accurate your initial estimates were.

When you’re baselining a project plan, stakeholder buy-in is essential. During the kick-off meeting, explain the plan to your team, the client, company management, and everyone else who is involved, so that they understand what they have to do, approve, etc. Make https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ sure that they don’t equate the project plan with its timeline, which is only part of the baseline. A roadmap or gantt chart is easy to reference to see how your project is tracking. This can be tricky with multiple work streams and dependencies between teams.

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I’m not judging- I used to do that too, and I understand my early team had special nicknames for me as a result. Slavedriver allegations aside, don’t promise a result that will damage team morale and produce a ‘hurried’ result. If I’ve worked on similar projects before, I know which tasks are dependent on others , which makes it easier to develop a critical path. If I’m venturing into new territory, I talk to more experienced colleagues or go on the Project Management Stack Exchange, which is an excellent Q&A resource for project managers.

Cost baselines usually include contingency reserves, too—a critical part of effectively managing costs. Project baselines are indispensable tools that can keep your projects on track, your teams motivated, and your clients happy. By taking the time to create, optimize, manage, and track them, you’ll overcome most hurdles and produce results you’ll be proud of. It’s not a promising statistic, but it is one that you can avoid if you make sure that the baseline is clear to everyone.

Agile & DevOps

They establish an approved budget for the project to help you track actual costs against that budget. This allows project managers to identify potential cost overruns. The Project Management Institute’s 2018 survey suggested that poor resource forecasting causes 18% of project failures.

It is not recommended to alter a project baseline without first following formal change control procedures, such as a change request form and approval process. Therefore, you ought to review the project’s actual costs using the project baseline to determine what went wrong and when. As our points of reference, the project’s scope, schedule, and cost baselines act as a map in the form of a treasure hunt.

Improve future estimates

Your project’s performance measurement would only be meaningful if you had an accurate baseline to begin with. Setting a cost baseline is important because keeping to your project budget is important. Going over budget is a sure sign that your project is heading in the wrong direction.

While project managers try to avoid this, unforeseen circumstances happen which cause changes. These changes can impact the project performance, resources, and especially the baseline. When this happens, project managers must change the baseline for the project. Because the way the current project is no longer matches the scenario for the original baseline. Companies can also use the baseline to calculate the earned value of a project.

Add realistic buffers to your budget and schedule

Together, these baselines help stakeholders understand how changes to your scope, timeline, or budget will impact your project’s success. Project managers require a project baseline just as sailors require GPS. Since your project plan’s outlined beginning is known as a baseline in project management, it makes sense. Baselines for scope, cost, and schedule are used as a point of comparison and aid in keeping our projects on schedule. As was previously mentioned, every project requires a baseline so that project managers can keep track of how well the project is progressing. To find discrepancies, actual performance is compared to baselines for scope, cost, and schedule.

• Building brand recognition and promoting early sales of the product are your objectives as you are given a project budget.
• Your employer has asked you to create a social media campaign to coincide with the launch of a new product.
• Whether your org company sprints, hours, days, or weeks, your project baseline needs a schedule.
• A project baseline helps add valuable context to that conversation.
• You can also easily keep an eye on timelines throughout the project.

A baseline sets an important point of comparison to be used throughout a project’s life cycle. After you have the PMB, you can use it over time to monitor your project progress. Throughout the project, you’ll use the baselines to gain an understanding of how the project is performing relative to the original plan. After you understand what needs to be done, you can complete your scope baseline with a WBS—which is often accompanied by a resource breakdown structure or RBS. These structures are hierarchical representations of what activities the project team needs to complete and what resources are necessary for each work package.

Planning

If it will push your project too far off baseline, you can reject the change and close out the change request. Then as your project progresses, you use those baselines as a point of reference to monitor your project’s performance over time. As the project progresses, you need to be able to update project plan information to reflect what is actually happening on a day to day or week to week basis. This takes more time on our part, but has the benefit of allowing us to have a real handle on how the project is actually progressing.