You’ve set up your project in Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project and created a project baseline. But what, exactly, is the point of capturing the baseline? You already know that the project is going to shift from that position, because change is inevitable in a fast-moving business leading dynamic projects.
So why bother with baselines at all?
There are three types of project baseline. In this article we are focusing on the baseline that relates to the project schedule and captures a moment in time on your Gantt chart. Read our guide to baselines in Primavera P6 for a better understanding of how to create baselines.
Once you’ve got them created, you can use baselines for all kinds of project performance measurement and tracking. Here are four ways you can use your schedule baseline to better manage your projects.
1. Compare actual progress to planned progress
This is the first thing most project managers think about when they consider how to use their baseline.
You can review the current state of the schedule against the snapshot of the original schedule and compare and contrast.
Look for:
- Tasks that have finished early
- Tasks that have finished late
- Missed milestones (or, rarely, milestones that were reached early!)
- Changes to resource allocation that affect the schedule
- Changes to scope that affect the schedule
- Trends to do with the speed of project delivery across the project as a whole and particular departments or workstreams.
Basically, you are checking to see that you’re making the progress you expected to. It’s normal for there to be small changes between your planned dates and the actual dates, but overall hopefully your critical path and key milestones are not too far adrift from where you thought you would be.
2. Review the accuracy of estimates
Once your initial comparison is complete, it is time to dig into some of those data points and see what you can learn from them.
This is an especially useful activity if your project is running late. A common reason for project delays is that estimates weren’t that good in the first place.
Look back at what tasks have driven the slippage and see if you can spot any commonalities in how they were estimated. Was one particular approach used? Did the figures all come from one team? Did you use a past project as the basis for estimating?
Then look at tasks which have not yet happened that were estimated using the same process or individuals. Perhaps one team is over-ambitious about how much work they can realistically do, or they no longer have the same capacity as they did when estimates were created. This is going to affect the work going forward.
Re-estimate any tasks that need it so you are working with the most realistic expectations possible for future dates. That’s likely to make significant changes to your project schedule. Talk to the project sponsor, re-align expectations and take a new baseline that more accurately reflects what you can deliver.
3. Use the data for Earned Value calculations
Earned Value is another way to track project progress. This approach to project reporting relies on there being a clear project schedule against which to track.
Your baseline snapshot is exactly that. If you need to use EV on your project, you’ll need a baseline you can rely on.
Then you can run your EV calculations, or use EV software apps to calculate the right metrics for project tracking. You’ll be able to compare actual progress to planned progress and communicate that clearly.
4. Review project achievements
At the end of the project, you will hold a review meeting to assess whether the project met the original goals and objectives. You might call them KPIs or OKRs or success criteria, but you should have some kind of original benchmark for what a successful outcome looked like for the project.
The project’s objectives will cover a range of topics and quality measures, so your schedule is only an input to the conversation. It’s a useful resource for seeing if date-driven success criteria were achieved. And you can also use it as reference material for better understanding the impact of changes on the project.
Be warned: When we’ve used the baseline schedule as part of a post-implementation review, the team have sometimes been shocked to see how far the project deviated from the planned dates. All the small changes add up over time! You may have perfectly good business reasons for making those changes, but it’s still a surprise to see how much difference there is between the original plan and what the team ended up delivering to.
There’s no reason not to use schedule baselines for measuring project performance. Plug your dates into your scheduling tool and the project management software wizardry will capture your baseline for you. And now you know how to use it, you’ve got a new tool to help with project tracking and performance. It’s so simple to take a snapshot in time of your project schedule, you’ll wonder how you managed without it!