Week 3_4 Discussion - Simran Singh
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Baselining a project means setting a reference point for the project in terms of most
critical high-level factors such as expected cost at completion, schedule and scope of the project.
Project baselining is done during the project planning phase initially but it can be revisited if
needed in cases that require a change in the baseline. Baselining is critical for any project
because without it all the team will try and justify things like additional scope requirements, cost
overruns and missed deadlines for the project. For example, think of a project that requires
building a minimum viable product (MVP) for movie streaming. While executing the project,
there can be many new ideas and asks from involved stakeholders that might be great to have in
the product but including everything in the project will certainly throw the project off in terms of
scope and cost and maybe timeline as well. So, with baselining a project the team attempts at
setting expectations and if something moves those parameters or baseline out of the plan then the
team needs to regroup and decide if that’s the right way to proceed or if any additional changes
or pushing back on the asks is required to keep these 3 pillars intact.
There are mainly three things that are baselined in a project – Scope baseline, Schedule
baseline and Cost baseline (Tiefensee, 2023). As we all know that these three are the main pillars
or north stars that tell if a project is on the right track or was successful when completed. Scope
baseline refers to setting or defining what are the things that are needed at minimum to say that
the project is completed. If there is a point where stakeholders have concerns and want new
things added to the project then the project manager needs to evaluate on how that would change
the initial scope baseline, and once done needs to raise a flag with the team on why should or
shouldn’t the team include the new ask. Schedule baseline refers to setting up a timeline of when
the project is planned to finish. The project manager doesn’t need to wait till the end of that
planned timeline to surface issues and rather should include various deadlines for different
deliverables. These should be reviewed on a biweekly basis at minimum to see if the project will
deviate from the baseline based on the project progress made till date.
Cost baseline refers to setting up a baseline on what the team expects as the final cost
incurred when the project completes (Satpathy, 2023). There is no achievement in completing the
project by doubling the cost that was planned or baselined, so a project manager needs to track
and give visibility to everyone on how does the project look from the baseline perspective.
Additionally, there should be a recurring review set up to monitor on changes that might increase
the cost or how much buffer the cost baseline offers if any new resource is needed.
References
Satpathy, A. (2023, May 15).
What is Baselining? What is a Project Baseline?
Modern
Requirements. https://www.modernrequirements.com/blogs/why-is-baselining-a-critical-
strategy
Tiefensee, N. (2023, March 16). Everything You Must Know Before Baselining a Project.
Everything You Must Know Before Baselining a Project
.
https://www.runn.io/blog/baselining-a-project#what-does-baselining-a-project-mean
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