Project Baseline Best Practices

Summary

A Project Baseline is essentially a snapshot of the project's schedule and effort. Baselines are an effective means of measurement control to measure progress over the course of a project.

After the project has been planned, the schedule and budget have been developed, and resources have been assigned, an initial baseline of schedule and effort should be created. Please note that, in Planview Enterprise, this Project Baseline is separate from saving the Project Financial Version baseline, which is a budget snapshot, broken out by labor and expense categories. The Project Baseline represents a contract between the providers and the customers for what activities are to be completed, by when, and using what effort. This baseline is used to measure project progress.

Multiple baselines may be created and saved for informational and comparative purposes. The project manager is typically responsible for defining which baseline is to be marked as the working baseline for comparison.