Introduction to baselines

A baseline is a record of all or any part of a project at a particular point in time. It contains a copy of everything in the project, for example bars, tasks, links, resource allocations, libraries, histograms and annotations. You can create as many baselines as you want for a project.

Once you have created a baseline you can view it in either of the following ways:

Displaying it within the original project so that you can compare the baseline against the original project.
Opening it as a separate project.

Baselines are useful for tracking the progress of a project and for experimenting with 'what if' scenarios. For example you could:

Baseline the project plan before work gets underway so that you have a record of the planned schedule. When work starts on the project, you can compare the project's actual progress against the baseline of the original plan. You can compare planned resource and cost usage with actual resource and cost usage by graphing the values in histograms.
Baseline the project regularly throughout its duration, for example at the end of every month or at major project milestones, so that you have a history of the project's progress. By comparing the baselines to the actual project, you can see exactly when a project becomes behind or ahead of schedule.
Baseline the project, then experiment with a different scenario. If the new scenario is acceptable, you can delete the baseline and continue working with the new scenario. If the new scenario is not acceptable, you can overwrite it by reverting to the baseline project.

If you have built up a portfolio of projects within one file by identifying that individual charts and summary groups are projects themselves, you can associate a different baseline with each individual project. Doing this enables you to merge new and updated information into each project's baseline individually and to display baseline information in the spreadsheet and bar chart that relates specifically to the project that is currently in view. Once a baseline has been associated with a project, it is known as a 'project baseline'.

You can show the effect of current progress on a baselined plan by displaying a 'jagged progress' view - also known as a 'zig-zag progress' view and as a 'Manhattan skyline' view - which superimposes the percentage complete values of the tasks in a live project onto the tasks in the current baseline. This gives you an indication of how the project is progressing against the original plan.

Some baseline information is available in fields so, by referencing the appropriate field, you can include baseline information in annotations and the spreadsheet.

Before the release of version 15.0.01, baselines of local projects - as opposed to Asta Enterprise projects - were always separate files, with a .PPB file extension. From version 15.0.01 onwards, you can choose whether you want any new baselines that you create for local projects to be separate files, or to be embedded into the corresponding project file. Baselines of Asta Enterprise projects are stored in data sources and baselines of Asta Vision projects always exist as separate files; you cannot embed these types of baselines.

You can specify whether baselines are "active" or "inactive". It is good practice to make only those baselines that you are currently using "active". If you choose to premount projects and baselines, inactive baselines are not premounted, which improves project performance. Data from inactive baselines is excluded from the user interface, except from the Baseline/What If Manager dialog itself.