The Benefits of Baselines

Many project managers work hard to build an accurate schedule and then, omit the final step of saving a baseline! A baselined schedule provides so many benefits you don’t want to miss. Here are some key benefits of schedule baselines:

• Track your project against the original plan. Experienced project managers know that no plan survives contact with reality! To get automated project status, you need to use a scheduling tool (such as MS Project, Primavera, and others). And those tools need a baseline before they can provide reports comparing actual progress and cost to your original plan. Actuals compared to the baseline can then be used to forecast time and cost going forward.
• Improve your estimating. Baselined project schedules help show when actuals diverge from the original plan. Seeing the variances from the plan can help improve estimates. Estimators get feedback on the accuracy of their estimates. Without this feedback, estimation won’t improve. Say you ask someone to estimate a task, and they tell you it will take two weeks. It ends up taking four weeks. If the person never hears about that variance, they’ll still say two weeks next time, when the task will likely take four.
• Reinforce accountability with team members and management. Sharing a baselined schedule reinforces the schedule and the time team members have committed to your project. The same is true for management. It helps reinforce management’s commitment to dedicate staff to the project. As business priorities change, project staff time might change as well. You can compare the baseline staff allocations to the actual time spent  to show why a project is behind schedule.
• Manage thresholds. Project status reporting often uses traffic light indicators. Green means all is well. Yellow indicates trouble brewing. And red means there are issues. These colors usually indicate a level of variance from plan. For example, 0-2% over schedule may be green. 2-5% over schedule is yellow. And greater than 5% over schedule is red. Tracking actuals against the baseline plan forms the basis for these variations.
• Make program planning easier. When managing a program, a deliverable from one project can be a predecessor to a task on another project. In this instance, it’s vital to understand when tasks will be completed. A baselined schedule along with updated, actual task completion dates helps you understand how one project’s performance will affect another in a program.

What other ways do you use baselines to improve project performance? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about schedule baselines, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course, which is unlocked through the end of 2025 with this link.