Baseline Process

Baseline Process

The baseline process is a repeatable process throughout the life of the project. After setting the initial baseline, the project evolves. Activities are added, deleted and moved, and you experience delays, differing resource requirements, and many other changes. To compare your progress to a baseline grounded in the "real world", most projects (particularly those longer than a year) will set new baselines as the project progresses.

In Safran Project, you can see a log of baselines for the current project by clicking the Baseline Log icon in the PROJECT ribbon.

Setting a new Baseline

The actual process of setting a revised baseline is very similar to setting the initial baseline in the previous baseline chapter. The main difference is how you make scope changes. Once "Lock Scope" is turned on, you must change the scope using a change control process via Variation Orders.

When setting a new baseline, we recommend starting with re-planning all activities. This might sound difficult, but it ensures that the activities are placed where they belong in terms of time and logic.

You should also set Timenow equal to the day after the cutoff you are using for the baseline. Remember that if you run the new baseline without changing Timenow, the existing baseline will be overwritten.

When you are ready to run a new baseline:

• Move Timenow to one day after the cutoff you are using.
• Select Set Baseline from the PROJECT ribbon.
• Enter the new revision number (typically v1 for the first revised baseline, and so on.
• Enter any remarks/comments and click OK to run the baseline.

Partial Baseline

It is also possible to run partial baselines for a selection of activities in the project.

A typical example is when you need to add a substantial amount of work, perhaps an entire sub-project, to the existing project, but the next baseline run is still several months away. In this case, running a partial baseline on the added scope is helpful so that scope is included when you run reports comparing actuals to the baseline.

When you run a partial baseline, the baseline information for the selected activities is added to the latest total baseline so that the activities are aligned baseline-wise.

Baseline annulment

It is possible to undo a baseline. You can do this by running a baseline annulment. Go to PROJECT > Baseline to find the option. For security reasons, only the user that ran the baseline can perform an annulment.

Please note that a baseline annulment should be considered a last resort. The baseline process is crucial to successful planning and should only be run once all parties have agreed upon the plan.