Work Plan Baseline Basics
This article explains the basics of saving baselines of your work plan in OnePlan.
Video Length - 1:46
Now that you have worked with your team and stakeholders to create an agree on the Project's schedule. It's time to start executing the plan before you start tracking actual progress against the plan a common best practice is to save a baseline of the original plan.
A baseline is a snapshot of the original project schedule based on the initial understanding of how the project will be delivered by the project team. The reason it's important is because it's like a handshake between the project manager team and stakeholders. Once you have a baseline in place. You can determine how well the project is performing versus the original plan.
Out of the box, OnePlan saves the following five fields for each task to the baseline:
% Done: % Done tracks percent complete. Remember the percent done in an original baseline should be zero percent because no actual progress is tracked at this point in the schedule.
Start Date
Finish Date
Effort: Effort is typically measured in the estimated hours needed to complete the task.
Remaining Effort: Remaining effort is how many hours are left once work starts on the tasks. Because there should be no associated actuals when an initial baseline is saved, remaining effort should equal the estimated effort. That way, you can track your actual progress against the original plan to determine how the project is performing at the task level as well as overall project performance.
To save a baseline of your entire project schedule (or all of the tasks in the schedule), See Save a Baseline for All Tasks for instructions and more information.
To save a baseline of a few selected tasks, see Save a Baseline for Selected Tasks for instructions and more information.