What is baseline

See more words from the same year. Accessed 11 Nov. More Definitions for baseline. See the full definition for baseline in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Nglish: Translation of baseline for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of baseline for Arabic Speakers.

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Definition of baseline. Examples of baseline in a Sentence The experiment is meant only to provide a baseline for other studies. If your schedule baseline has a four-week completion, you can tell that there is a problem, and your team may need to make adjustments to speed up your progress.

A project baseline typically has three components: schedule, cost, and scope. Often, these three baselines are separately monitored, controlled, and reported to ensure each is on track. When fully integrated, it may be referred to as a performance measurement baseline PMB.

A PMB provides you with the ability to efficiently monitor and manage how a change in one component affects the others. For example, when your baselines are integrated, you can quickly tell how a schedule delay will impact project costs.

However, many organizations do not have the tools and processes required to fully integrate the three baselines. To set a project baseline, you must first determine the scope of your project. This can be done with a scope statement, which is a list of project objectives and deliverables.

Break down all the work required to achieve these deliverables into individual tasks and subtasks with detailed descriptions. Next, you must map out your project schedule with clearly defined due dates and a final deadline.

A good tool to use here is a Gantt chart , which can be easily edited and adjusted according to changing deadlines. Estimate how long each task will take and allocate resources accordingly. Now, you should plan the total cost of your project. Take into account all relevant factors, including hourly rates, available resources, and varying PPC costs. Link this budget plan to your schedule to ensure the two are aligned.

Your project baseline must be clearly outlined before you can move on to the next stage: stakeholder buy-in. Set up a meeting to present your plan, address any stakeholder concerns, and make any necessary edits. This is an important step in setting your project baseline, as it highlights any potential design flaws, which will be easier to fix before you start the project.

Your employer has asked you to create a social media campaign to coincide with the launch of a new product. You are allotted a project budget, and your goal is to build brand awareness and encourage early sales of the product. In this project baseline example, you must first outline all the tasks needed to improve your conversion rate and achieve the end goal of sales. In business-to-business B2B marketing, the term is also being used to describe a growing market segment for information technology IT View Full Term.

By clicking sign up, you agree to receive emails from Techopedia and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. In IT management, a baseline is the expected values or conditions against which all performances are compared. A baseline is a fixed reference point.

From a project management perspective, the creation of baselines is considered as the official end of project planning and the start of project execution and control. Control of baselines is crucial for project and IT management. A baseline is the visible measure or progress and often marks milestones. In other words, a baseline serves as a crucial input for performing analysis to evaluate current performance against anticipated levels for the specific tasks in an established time-phase.

A baseline also helps in understanding a historical view of product elements for similar projects. Project leaders could evaluate the relative progress of specific parts of a project and a project as a whole with the help of this information. Thus it helps in the forecasting of the outcome of the project.