Baselines Overview

Setting the Original Baseline Video

A baseline is a copy of a project's schedule data at a given point in time. As a static representation of the project plan, it can be used as a benchmark against which to measure performance as the project progresses. Create multiple baselines to evaluate performance at different phases of the project lifecycle. Project managers can also create and assign baseline categories to help provide more identifying context for baselines when they are created.

When you create a baseline, you can set the baseline date to capture project data at any point between the project creation date and the current date. This is useful if you want to add a baseline for project data as it existed on a specific date in the past. If you forgot to add a baseline on a specific date, select a past baseline date to use the data from that date.

Baselines can be opened on the Activities page to view the project data represented by the baseline. When a baseline is open, baseline values are used to populate the standard schedule fields. When the current schedule, a baseline, or a scenario is open, a baseline's values are used to populate corresponding baseline fields. Baseline fields are used for comparison with the current schedule or scenario fields. For example, if the original baseline is open, the baseline's start values populate Start date fields. If the current schedule or a scenario is open, Start date fields are populated with current schedule or current scenario values, and Original BL Start date fields are populated with original baseline values. The baseline fields used for comparison in the current schedule are empty when any baseline is open.

Baselines can also be opened so that they can be updated. While updating baseline data is not a typical project management practice, there may be situations where minor adjustments to a baseline need to be made by the project manager or scheduler. You can modify most of the data in a baseline as you would the data in the current schedule. The data stored by a baseline is unique to that baseline. For example, actions such as updating activity data, assigning resources and roles, scheduling activities, leveling resources and roles, and using the schedule health check tool do not affect the current schedule, other baselines, or schedule scenarios. You cannot manually add new activities to a baseline, but you can add existing activities from the current schedule to a baseline and update the data for existing baseline activities. If you need to replace your current schedule with the data from a baseline, you can set the baseline as the current schedule. If the changes you make to a baseline need to be undone, you can revert the baseline back to its original state, as long as that baseline was created in Oracle Primavera Cloud and not imported from P6. The baseline must be open before it can be updated or reverted. See Open a Baseline for more information.

Note: Because of differences in how data is managed in P6 and Oracle Primavera Cloud, you cannot revert changes made to a baseline if that baseline was imported from a P6 XML file.

There are four types of baselines in the application: original, current, supplementary, and unofficial:

An original baseline is an official baseline that is typically set when the project has been approved. It may also be referred to as the Performance Measurement Baseline (PMB). Setting an original baseline captures values in all original baseline fields. Original scope values cannot be updated after the original baseline is set.
A current baseline, also referred to as the active baseline, is an official baseline used to measure differences between current project values and the original values. You can only set a current baseline after an original baseline has been set.
The supplementary baseline is an official baseline that can be used for any purpose. A supplementary baseline might be created before a major schedule update to capture the state of the project before the update.
Unofficial baselines can be created to capture how the project is progressing or they can come from previous official baselines. For example, a baseline that was previously set as your official current baseline is not removed when you set a new current baseline. It instead becomes an unofficial baseline that is retained for future reference.

At any point in time, you can have one original baseline, one current baseline, one supplementary baseline, and an unlimited number of unofficial baselines. You can change the types of existing baselines or remove a baseline's type to make it an unofficial baseline. Any baseline can be opened for viewing or updating.

The distinction between official baselines and unofficial baselines is that official baselines—original, current, and supplementary—have corresponding baseline fields while unofficial baselines do not. To view the field values stored in an unofficial baseline, you can either change its type to an official baseline or set it as a user baseline preference. You can set up to three existing baselines as user baseline preferences, which typically indicate the baselines that are most important to you. The baselines set as your preferences are used to populate the values in user baseline fields. This is useful when you want to measure project performance against baselines other than the official project baselines. Set on the Activities page, user baseline preferences apply only to the user who set them. Official or unofficial baselines can be set as user baselines.

Schedule Management

For schedule management, each baseline captures a complete set of data about the project schedule, including activity dates, durations, units, costs, float, and percentages. After the project schedule is developed, an original baseline should be set to establish points of reference to monitor your schedule as it changes over time. When the current baseline is created, all of the current baseline fields are updated to reflect the current project values.

To measure schedule performance, configure views that show baseline variance fields to identify activities that are not progressing as planned. Baseline variance fields measure the differences between your current project values and your baseline values. You can view variances for your original, current, supplementary, and user baselines. Variances are useful in identifying the activities with the greatest impact to your original project plan.

When activity date indicators are enabled, the baseline Start and Finish date fields will display visual indicators when a constraint is configured for the activity or if an actual start date or actual finish date is set. See Configure Activity Date Indicators to enable indicators.

Official and user baselines can also be configured as bars to be displayed in the Gantt chart and used to monitor activity progress visually on the project timeline.

Earned Value functionality is also supported for schedule management use cases. Designate one of your existing baselines as the project's earned value baseline. This enables earned value metrics to be calculated for the activities in your project. Activity earned value data is rolled up to the WBS and project levels. Earned value metrics track current schedule and budget performance against the designated baseline. There are a variety of supported fields that you can use to monitor progress, including planned value, earned value, schedule and cost variances, schedule and cost performance indexes, estimates to complete, and estimates at completion. Most earned value metrics can be viewed in terms of costs or labor units. If you already have a baseline that should be used for earned value, it is recommended that you open the baseline to schedule it to a data date appropriate for that baseline, and then recalculate its costs. These actions ensure that the baseline fields referenced in earned value calculations are accurate and up to date.

Scope Management

For scope management, a current baseline is created to capture all approved changes since the original baseline was created. When the current baseline is created, all the baseline fields are updated to reflect the current values and are in turn used in certain calculations to measure progress. The original values are not changed.

For a work package, there are four baseline attributes that the user can refer to after a baseline has been set: Baseline Cost, Baseline Hours, Baseline Start, and Baseline Finish. For each scope assignment, there are five baseline attributes: Baseline Start, Baseline Finish, Baseline Cost, Baseline Hours, and Baseline Quantity. When the original baseline is set, these fields are populated with the original values. After the original baseline is set, all changes needed for scope items, work packages, and scope assignments must go through a review process, which is initiated by submitting change and transfer requests.