Baselines and Interim Plans

Watch our video about baselines and interim plans in Microsoft Project:

Many users are confused by what's a Baseline and what's an Interim Plan. In terms of Microsoft Project, the Baseline is a snapshot of your project information. At the same time the Interim Plans is also a snapshot. But the difference is what goes into this snapshot. Baselines comprise the following items: "start" and "finish dates", "duration", "work' and all the custom information. Inside the Interim Plans, we have "start" and "finish dates" only.

If your project is standard and it is necessary to compare the "duration", "work cost" and "dates", you need to use the Baselines. If your project is small, you don’t track any cost and work information, you just compare the dates along the lifecycle of your project, you might be fine with Interim Plans. If your project is large and multilayered, you probably might use the combination of baselines and interim plans.

To set the Baseline:

1       1. Click on Set Baseline button on the ribbon.

         2. Click Set Baseline.

3      3. In an opened window, choose the option: set Baseline. You can save up to ten baselines.

4      4. Under For, do one of the following:

-          To set the baseline for all project data, click Entire Project.

-          To set the baseline for only the tasks that you selected, click Selected tasks.

5       5. Under Roll up baselines, select how you want baseline data to be rolled up:

-          To all summary tasks.   

-          From subtasks into selected summary task(s).    

         6. Press OK.

 

To set the Interim Plan:

          1. Click Set Baseline button on the ribbon.

          2. Click Set Baseline.

          3. In opened window, choose an option: set Interim Plan. You can save up to ten interim plans.

4        4. In the Copy box, click the "start" and "finish" or baseline values that you want to save.

5        5. In the Into box, click the name of the interim plan into which you want to copy the values.

6        6. Click Entire project or Selected tasks.

7        7. Press OK.

Hope this helps. Please contact us should any questions arise.