Baseline best practices using MS Project

Many new users to MS Project, or any other project management tool for that matter, do not set baselines for their project files. Without a baseline, however, a you can never really accurately gauge performance on the project. For instance, you won’t see variances or earned value data.

A baseline is what I call an original snapshot of your project. When you set a baseline (MS Project 2007 calls it ‘Set baseline’; all previous versions refer to it as ‘Save baseline’), you are essentially saving Start, Finish, Duration, Work, and Cost data for the entire project, each subproject, and each subtask.

Although you may have multiple baselines for each project (up to 11 baselines in MS Project), nearly all of my clients and students only have a need for one. I usually recommend only using one anyway since there is no quick way to extract those other baselines without additional configuration. Anyway, I’ll save that topic for another day.

In the meantime, here are some general best practices for setting baselines:

• Set your baseline when you are ready to begin the project. That means when it has been approved, the day before, the morning of, etc…
• Only clear baselines when you don’t want to see baseline data in your tables and views. Otherwise, simply set the baseline again and MS Project will overwrite the previous baseline.
• If you have new tasks during the project, you can save a baseline on only those tasks so you don’t have to save the baseline for the entire project.
• Interim plans are similar to baselines but MS Project only saves Start and Finish data.