Clarity

 Hi,

What are the benefits of using baseline vs cost plan? We can track non-labor info is tracked using cost plans.

Thanks
Rama 

I think the purpose for the two are different. They can certainly overlap. But Cost Plans can be converted to a Budget Plan which can be your financial Baseline for the project. The audience for this is mostly the financial department and the project sponsorer. Whereas the purpose of Baseline on the project/Tasks is to measure and govern the quality of project management. The audience for this is mainly the PMO  and PSO.

Both cost plans and project baselines would complement each other. Executive management would be interested in summarized information from both but look at them with different pair of glasses. 

BTW, Non-labour information would be captured in both the baselines. 

Project baselines are versions of the schedule part of the project plan ie typically they would have tasks, resources, assignments and ETC's and actuals for those which can also have monetary values. Baselines serve as snapshots a give points of time to monitor scheduled progress.

Financial plans may be based on resource assignments or allocations or they can be manually created. Even if they come from the resource assignments they are not automatically updated. Only the actuals may be updated from the PPA_WIP if they are posted to WIP.

Financial plans serve for mored versatile planning and monitoring project financial data grouped in different ways to suit the needs of the watch dogs for money.

If you look at the ER digragms in the Tech Ref you can see how the baselines and financial plans relate to investments and to each other.

Martti K.