Monitoring and controlling are crucial components of project management. Monitoring and controlling activities are used to determine if the project’s expected outcomes have changed. These monitoring and controlling activities can be done by using project baselines. One of the three project baselines is the schedule baseline. In PMP Training, the scope and cost baselines are also defined. They all create the Performance measurement baseline.
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What are Project Baselines in General
Project baseline is a snapshot of a project taken at a particular time, as described in the project management professional course. Project baseline shows how far the current results have diverged from the plans. These plans are then compared to the project baseline. If a change request is made, it will have an impact on the schedule, cost, and other details. If the plans are changed, a new baseline project must be established.
What is Schedule Baseline?
It is an approved version that can only be modified through formal change control procedures. Once the project schedule is created, it is necessary to establish a baseline. Because actual results may not be as expected at the beginning or during project monitoring and control. To determine the variation, the actual results will be compared to the baseline schedule. Based on the variation, corrective and preventive actions must be taken to get back on track.
What is included in Schedule Baseline?
It will include the start and end dates for each activity. Therefore, actual results will be checked against the schedule baseline. It will be used to compare actual results with planned values in order to verify the project’s schedule performance.
Example
Let’s take an example: If an activity was scheduled for 5 days but took 8 days to execute, there will be a 3 day variance. If the activity is on a critical path, it will cause 3 day delay in exceeding the project schedule.
This is only an example of one activity. If you believe there will be multiple activities in a project’s schedule, comparing actual results with the baseline schedule will give an overall indication about project schedule performance. If the project schedule is not as planned, it is necessary to apply appropriate schedule compression techniques to complete the remaining activities in a shorter amount of time to complete the project on schedule.
Schedule BaselineReview by Luke Brown5/5 stars