Microsoft® Office Project 2007 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Working with Baselines and Interim Plans

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✓	Understanding baselines and interim plans
✓	Saving baselines and interim plans
✓	Changing and clearing a baseline or interim plan
✓	Viewing the critical path

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Creating tasks, assigning resources, and establishing task dependencies describe the planning phase of creating a project schedule. The planning phase can help you clarify what you need to do and what resources you’ll need to do it. But using Project doesn’t stop there. When you move into the phase of actually doing the project, Project can continue to help you.

If you set a baseline for your project, Project can help you compare your original estimates with what actually occurs and to alert you to shifts in timing. As you see in this chapter, you can set more than one baseline, and you can use interim plans to capture dramatic timing shifts in your project. Finally, you can use the critical path to identify the tasks that will cost you the most, both in time and expense, if they slip.

Understanding Baselines and Interim Plans

As you prepare to track actual progress on a project (discussed in the next chapter of this minibook) you should establish a baseline for your project. The baseline is the detailed project plan against which actual work is tracked. Setting a baseline is like taking a picture of your project schedule at the moment your planning is complete but before you begin to record actual information about the progress of ...