Project Baseline

You’re project has gone into implementation mode. While everyone on the project team gets knee-deep into their action items, you, the project manager, try to stay across all the moving parts. The deadlines, the budgets, the roll out of deliverables that have dependent tasks attached to them, and the regular stakeholder updates.

But how do you do that, exactly? How do you track the progress of the entire project, and all the bits and pieces that will drive each deliverable to the finish line?

Great project managers do it with the help of a project baseline. A living document that helps them benchmark and monitor the progress of their project. If you don’t know what this handy little doc is, then keep reading. We explain why every project needs a project baseline, and take you through the five steps to create one, so you keep your clients, stakeholders and sponsors happy!

What Is A Project Baseline?

Project baselines are reference documents you use to drive and track the progress of a project against your initial plan. They are vital tools that help you pick-up and identify any deviations from project scope, schedule, or budget.

By checking back on your project baseline regularly, you can:

Stay in line – Make sure you are on schedule to deliver the goods your project promises, within the budget that’s been allocated.
Adapt approach – Realign and update your baseline or bring in new resources, if unexpected circumstances pop up, which can negatively impact the project’s progress or delay deliverables.
Manage client expectations – Use it to manage and make sure you meet client and stakeholder expectations throughout the project.
Encourage accountability – By having a document where you track the actual progress of each deliverable or milestone against the planned and expected progress, you can encourage a higher level of accountability within the project team.

Project Baseline VS. Project Plan

The difference between a project baseline and a project plan lies in the purpose they serve.

A project baseline is a benchmarking document that is supposed to keep you in line, on schedule, and within budget.

It’s developed in the planning phase and used by project managers throughout the project implementation phase. Its main purpose is to make sure all tasks and milestones are tracked along nicely to reach the successful completion of project objectives, with delivery on time and within budget.

Project Plan

A project plan is a comprehensive document that outlines the entire project from rationale to implementation.

It’s also developed in the planning phase and used by project managers to see a project through from start to finish. While it can be shared with stakeholders to inform them of the granular details of a project, it’s generally used to inform and manage the project team on every aspect of the project. It includes details on the project goal, purpose, scope, budget, risk, and resource information, as well as a full list of stakeholders, a communication plan, and a schedule.

Components Of A Project Baseline

The project baseline covers three core tracking components that impact and play a vital role in the successful or failed completion of a project.

Scope

The scope lists the stakeholder approved project deliverables you aim to achieve and accomplish. Within the project baseline document, you need to clearly identify what’s included in your project’s scope of work. This should be a concrete breakdown of individual tasks that can be easily viewed and monitored throughout the life of the project.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) reports that a significant 35% of projects experience scope creep. This means you need to be prepared to identify when this is happening, and you need to find a way to manage it. Project baselines can support you in saying no to additional scope items.

Schedule

The schedule displays the planned timeline for each of the tasks listed in the scope, with clearly defined start and finish dates. While all three components of the project baseline are important, the schedule is the one that will give you the most room to move in case you need to make adjustments.

With only 29% of projects mostly or always being completed on time, there is lots of room to improve this figure if you land more accurate scheduling and timeline estimates.

Cost

The cost or budget component is the estimated cost associated with the completion of each task in your scope list. This includes all costs, including personnel resources and materials. Next to each task on the project baseline document, record the budget you’ve set, which you will use to track spending throughout the project lifecycle.

PMI also tells us that 59% of projects are completed within budget. This means a little less than half didn’t have the right budget allocations in the first place. Using project baselines might help you stay out of the latter, budget-blowing group.

Why Are Project Baselines Important?

Do you need a project baseline document if you already have a project plan, which has the budget and task breakdowns, as well as the project schedule? Yes. This is because the baseline is a more concise tracking document. It will make life easier for you and your project team.

According to a 2020 report by Wellingtone, 50% of project managers mostly or always use schedule baselines to track their project progress.

But if you’re looking for another reason, it can also help you prevent many project delays. Sometimes, if you don’t pick up glitches or bumps in the road early, they might surprise you when it’s too late to make changes or adjustments.

Below, we give you seven proof points that explain why project baselines are valuable and important reference tools to have on hand.

Monitor Goal Progress

Project roadmaps and scheduling tools like Gantt chart overviews can be useful to get a birds-eye view of the project. But when you have a project baseline, you have a tracking document with the planned costs and timelines for each task next to it, which makes it much easier to:

Monitor your work’s actual progress against the plan so you can quickly pick up where you might be falling short and make adjustments as soon as possible.
Keep on top of your team’s performance for each of their action items and identify if anyone is struggling so the right support or resources can be provided.
Report and update your stakeholders and clients on the progress and performance of the project at various intervals.

Control Scope Creep

Avoiding scope creep is a major challenge for project managers. When you have a project baseline document, you can:

Use it to turn down additional deliverable suggestions from ambitious stakeholders or clients throughout the project journey.
Avoid your finely-tuned project schedule and budget from being derailed because new, out-of-scope items have been thrown into the mix. Adding new action items will not only throw your entire implementation plan out of whack, it will also drive team members to burn out, and miss the deadlines of initial in-scope deliverables.

Resource Adjustments

Sometimes, you’ll lose a team member and other times; your technology will fail you. But when you have a baseline document that lists all the project action items, you’ll be able to:

Spot any work that has stalled and any work that is being delivered well ahead of schedule. You can then move your resources around to help boost the one falling behind. So, it can also act as a tool for more efficient resource management throughout the project.

Manage Schedule Delays

Putting a project schedule together is no small feat. When it’s done, you want to do your best to stick to it as much as possible because any movement can have (and usually does have) a direct flow-on effect on other items or aspects of the project. A project baseline document can help you:

Keep on top of dependent tasks. If one item is delayed it might affect and move the delivery of other action items in the schedule.
Take the stress out of keeping on top of delays on complex, large projects that have more items scheduled that need to be kept a close eye on and managed as soon as something goes off course.

Keep On Top of Budgets

Every project has a set budget. And because few are delivered within the approved figure, the project manager is responsible for justifying any additional cost blowouts. By having a cost or budget baseline for each of your deliverables, you can:

Avoid cost overruns for individual tasks and increase your chances of staying on budget for the entire project, as much as possible.
Identify budget discrepancies for deliverables. If you have overbudgeted for one and underbudgeted for another, you can reallocate and adjust budgets so you don’t have one team or individual struggling while another has cash sitting in their account.
Use it to find the deliverables that went over budget and work out why. This will be particularly helpful in the project closure phase of the project.

Change Management

Finally, project baseline documents can support in change management by:

Helping you determine when it’s time to implement a change management plan because things aren’t rolling along in a way that will result in the successful completion of a project.
Seeing if an already implemented change management plan is working and having enough of a positive impact on the intended outcome.

How To Create An Effective Project Baseline in 5 Steps

Now that you understand why project baselines are important and how they support you in the efficient running of a project let’s look at the five-step process for creating this document.

Step 1: Choose A Tool For Your Project Baseline

Before you create your project baseline, you’ll need to decide what tool you will use to set it up and where it will be stored. What you want is one that has robust capabilities in recording, monitoring, and editing tasks, setting timelines, and allocating set budgets to individual tasks.

Now, there are loads of software tools on the market for all types of project and workflow management. Most have been created with the project manager’s journey in mind, and they aim to make project tracking and implementation a smoother and easier process.

Our ActiveCollab tool is the perfect fit for creating your project baseline because it’s easy to set up, use, share, view, and edit as you go along.

Step 2: Establish Project Scope

The first part is setting the project scope baseline. One thing to remember here is that the items in your project scope need to be the ones that have already been signed off by your clients or stakeholders.

Now while a scope statement might seem like a good place to start, it’s probably too high level to be useful for this purpose.

Instead, the best place to turn to when trying to populate your list of scope items, is your project’s work breakdown structure (WBS). This is a visual representation of all the planned tasks and activities required to complete the project. You can simply lift and shift all the items to fill the scope section of your project baseline.

Step 3: Build Your Project Schedule

Next up, is building your project schedule baseline. So for each item in your scope list, you’ll need to set a planned start and finish date.

The best way to do that is to use the project schedule that was developed as part of your initial project plan. One piece of advice here: If you haven’t already included some buffer room for each task’s completion, do so now. That way, you’ll have some capacity to make up for delays without affecting the expected end-delivery deadlines.

Another thing you can consider doing is using the schedules of past similar projects to make more informed estimates for the start and finish dates of tasks.

Step 4: Define Cost Breakdown

Lastly, you need to allocate the planned cost or budget for each item in scope, so you’ve got a figure right next to the deliverable to keep the budget top of mind.

Here, again, it’s a good idea to use past projects as a guide. If you have access to past project data which includes resource and other material costs needed for individual tasks, you can use these to land a more accurate cost estimate.

That’s why it’s a good idea to use project or workflow management tools like ActiveCollab, which have a time tracking capability. This kind of reporting is invaluable in future resource planning and allocation.

Step 5: Share With Stakeholders & Monitor

When you’ve set up your project baseline, the final step is to share it with your clients or stakeholders if that’s how you plan to run the project. Alternatively you can keep the document as an individual reference document, which you use to track the performance of the project and update clients and stakeholders separately.

However, keep in mind that if you give your clients and stakeholders direct access to view the project baseline in real-time, it can increase transparency and trust, as well as efficiency. When everyone has access to view the progress of work, there won’t be emails and messages going back and forth asking for updates.

How ActiveCollab Helps You Create & Manage Project Baselines

Project baselines are concise reference documents that help you track the progress of your project against your initial plan. They include the full list of scope items, along with timelines and allocated budgets you want to meet rather than exceed.

ActiveCollab is a project management tool that lets you create, edit, share, and house project baselines in real-time without manual tracking. It also lets you display and visualize your baseline in three view types, including list, Gantt chart, and Kanban.

Four key capabilities that make it ideal for project managers working on initiatives of any size include:

Task dependencies – You can set task dependency relationships so that when one item moves, the dependent task follows and automatically updates the schedule.
Budget allocations – Set a budget for each task and record and track the spending of an allocated budget.
Timelines and reminders – Record the start and end dates for each task and get real-time notifications of the progress your team is making on the project.
Customized labeling – Set dozens of customized labels to tasks so you can filter and sort through project deliverables quickly.

No matter where you are in the world, ActiveCollab can help you run and monitor projects better. From client-facing businesses, such as marketing and design agencies, to startups and consultancies, customers love our product for the powerful functionalities we offer at an affordable price. And because we run in 22 languages, chances are wherever your clients and teams are, you’ll be able to work and collaborate in their language!

So if you haven’t given ActiveCollab a go, sign up to our 14-day free trial offer – If you’d like to learn more about the full list of features and ideal use cases, book a demo so one of our team members can introduce you to the tool!