Project Baselines

There are three important baselines that we need to know about. They are:

• Scope Baseline
• Cost Baseline
• Schedule Baseline

All three baselines are recognised as the Performance Measurement Baseline.
These three baselines are determined early in the project lifecycle. They are defined during the initiation of the project and described (or recorded) in the Project Charter.
As the project goes into execution, monitoring is being done to see if the project is;

• within the scope?
• within budget?
• within schedule

These questions are answered by comparing the current status of the project against the three baselines. The result derived from the raw data collected from these three aspects will determine the performance of the project. They will provide the information whether the project is

• meeting the stakeholders’ expectations?
• spending the right amount of money?
• completing in the allocated time?