Base Lining

In project management, a project schedule involves listing of a project’s milestones, activities, and deliverables, generally with estimated start and finish dates. These items are mostly estimated by some other information that is included in the project schedule such as resource allocation, budget, task duration, and linkages of dependencies and scheduled events.

A Project schedule is commonly used in the process of project planning and project portfolio management. The elements included in the project schedule might be closely related to the work breakdown structure (WBS) terminal elements or the Statement of work.

Some of the key components that a schedule maker must keep in his mind before the creation of a project schedule are,

1. A work breakdown structure (WBS)
2. An effort estimate for each task
3. A resource list with availability for each resource

In case the above components for the preparation of the schedule are not available, then they can be built with a consensus-driven estimation approach like Wideband Delphi. We can use an estimation approach for this as the schedule itself is an estimate where, each date in the schedule is estimated, but if the estimated dates do not have the buy-in of the people who are going to do the work, then the schedule will be considered inaccurate.

Pre-requisites for developing a project schedule are,

1. Scope of the Project
2. Sequence of activities
3. All the tasks grouped into five project phases (Conception, definition and planning, launch, performance, and close)
4. Task dependencies map
5. Critical path analysis
6. Project milestones

Conditions for a healthy project schedule

1. Constant updation of the schedule (weekly or monthly as per requirement)
2. EAC (Estimation at Completion) value must be equal to the baseline value
3. Remaining effort must be accordingly distributed among team members
4. Schedule structure may closely follow and include citations to the index of work breakdown structure or deliverables, with the help of decomposition or templates to describe the activities needed to produce the deliverables defined in the WBS.
5. Schedule may be assessed for the quality of the schedule development and the quality of the schedule management.

Base lining is a methodology for analyzing performance of the project. The process of base lining is marked by comparing current performance to a historical metric, or a given baseline. For instance, if you want to measure the performance of a network switch over a given period of time, then you could use that performance figure as a comparative baseline to make a change.

Base lining  is the process by which the quality and cost effectiveness of a service is analysed, usually in advance of a change to the service.  It generally includes comparison of the service before and after the change or analysis of trend information.  Here the term benchmarking is usually used in case the comparison is made against some  other organisation.

The method of Base lining is useful for many performance management tasks, such as

1. Monitoring daily performance
2. Measuring trends in performance

Assessing whether performance is meeting requirements laid out in a service agreement