3 Main Benefits of Project baselining

by Linda Russell

When you are finished planning your project, and you have all the scheduled dates, hours, and costs (and charges if appli Cable) Agreed, why was it a good idea to store those values? We Explore the reasons.

What is a Baseline?

A baseline is a set of stored values. Usually these would be:

• Original scheduled Start and Finish Dates.
• Planned Effort (May is expressed in hours).
• Planned or budgeted cost.
• Planned or budgeted Revenue.

Why Baseline?

The main benefits of having a project baseline is:

• Ability to assess performance.
• Earned Value calculation.
• Improved future estimating accuracy.

Assessing performance

If you know what the plan is, you can compare this with the actuals, and make a judgement on whether you ' re on track or n Ot. Your Software may have a ' traffic light ' or similar system to indicate this. This provides variance information which can is useful for the future estimating.

For instance, a task is planned to start last week and the planned effort/duration was ten days. It should therefore finish at the end of this week. It is now Monday of Week 2. The task actually started last Wednesday and, have reviewed the task, you now estimate are that it'll take another 8 da Ys to complete it.

Planned Start Monday Week 1	Actual Start Wednesday Week 1
Planned Finish Friday Week 2	Scheduled Finish Wednesday Week 3
Planned Duration	Revised Duration

Hence on estimates the task would take a extra day to complete and would be 3 days late.

This is a fairly crude the assessing how to well you ' re doing. If you add in a value of progress (percentage complete) a better measure are to use earned value. If you record the actual hours spent on the task, your software is able to calculate the percentage complete value.

Earned Value

With earned Value compare the planned hours and costs of work with the actual hours and costs, taking to account the Progress on each task and the project as a whole. It often includes the calculation of a performance indicator.

This allows is trends in performance, and thus to predict potential overruns. At the individual task level, it's a good indicator of how much time and cost should has been spent so far, compared with How much time/cost have actually been spent.

However, it is advisable not to place too much reliance on such forecasts, especially in the early stages of the project ' s Lifecycle, as few tasks have been started or completed; As time moves forward, the accuracy of the predictions increases, although you is still reliant on peoples ' assessments O F Progress.

When a task is completed, the earned Value figures'll be equal to the planned figures, so this measure cannot being used to Enhance estimating accuracy.

Improved estimating

When you create the your plan, you estimate how long each task would take, and how much effort would be required to complete it. The also work out of the likely costs and, if you ' re charging to work done, what the revenue would be. How does this? The tools most commonly used is previous experience-plus a device such as a crystal ball!

Can improve the accuracy of your estimating if you had a record of previous estimates compared with the actual outcom E. This can give you a margin of error (perhaps as a percentage) which the can build into all the future estimates.

If your project management software have a template facility at the end of each project you can use the variance data to U Pdate the template tasks with revised estimates.

Conclusion

Have a baseline on each project allows your to monitor current project performance and also to improve the accuracy of FU Ture estimates.

3 Main Benefits of Project baselining