Document a baseline

- [Voiceover] Once the stakeholders have approved the project plan, it's time to define your project baseline. The baseline is a collection of the approved project documents that you want to control with your change management process. Documents, requirements, spreadsheets, budgets, schedule, and so on. The baseline is important because you compare project performance to the baseline to see how the project's doing. Because the plan baseline is controlled by the change management process, any changes to baseline documents show up as change requests.

How you define the baseline depends on what you're defining. First, save the baseline version of plan documents. Then, if something changes, you flag those changes in a revision of the corresponding baseline document. Second, baseline the values in your project schedule. Project scheduling programs typically provide a feature for saving a baseline. The baseline includes the approved values for start and finish dates, task duration, work, cost, and so on.

As you record your progress or make changes to your schedule, the program can compare the current values to the baseline values to show any variances. After you define the project baseline, you're ready to use it to evaluate progress and project performance.