It is the planners responsibility to put together a baseline programme with inputs from the construction team and your PM on how you plan to execute the works (methodology and sequence) and this should conform with the contract requirements in terms of duration, key dates and milestone dates that you need to meet, which is usually stipulated in the contract.

It is absolutely imperative that you have a baseline programme so you have a basis for measuring performance.

This is also necessary when doing analysis for ,delay and disruption, delay due to changes, access and interface with other trade contractors, material deliveries, etc.

Without a good baseline programme, you have absolutely no idea of where you are and where you are going?

Cheers,
Daniel

Dear Joey,

The best thing that you can do is to start a new project with good planning and continue monitoring it and updating the progress as you go. Subsequently, you will feel the important of management and the meaning of the Curves.


Best Regards,

Samer

I think most Project Managers won’t agree that baselining is merely to impress upper management, however, I do agree that some are skeptical about it.

I have published a few months ago an article about the benefits of project baseline. Take a look, it might answer your questions.

Joey,
A baseline programme is essential if you are to measure the variance of current actual & forecast work with what you had planned in the baseline schedule and understand the consequences of such impacts. As to the ’s’ curve, do you have a particular one in mind? There can be many eg. actual/planned installed quantities, earned value etc. The basis of these curves is a whole subject on its own. Remember that, essentialy, the actual data shown on the curves is historical (its already happened) and, at best, may indicate future trends; a good planner should already know the variances impacting on the schedule before any ’s’ curves are published after the update period.Curves based on resources can be useful if, for example, a contractor is keeping to the critical path but his ’actual’ curve is falling behind the ’planned’ curve, indicating that he is not scheduling non-critical tasks as per the baseline ie. he probably has insufficient manpower on the job.

cheers,
Omar

Joey
A project always is based on an agreement. This will contain target budget, frames for time, resources and others. During the time of execution responsible persons need to know: Target still available within the constraints? So a copy of the project plan is made in the beginning and signed by the parties. Out of this plan, an s-curve to be created were you easily can see, which part of the project must be achieved at a certain date. The data which create the s-curve(s) must be agrred at the project’s start. During execution you can compare current with planned status.
--> Target still realistic?
This is on aspect of controlling; there are more, e.g. milestones, earned value, different kinds of percent complete, ...
First reader of the s-curve must be the project manager.
Regards
Dieter