Compare Actual Progress with Original Project Plan

4me automatically takes a snapshot of a project each time a new phase starts. These baselines tell project managers whether or not their projects are still on track.

A new option has become available that can be used to visualize the difference between a project’s original plan and its actual progress in the project’s Gantt chart. Initially a Gantt chart may look as follows:

Clicking on the vertical ellipsis next to the progress indicators in the Gantt chart’s header makes the new option ‘Show Baseline’ available. Selecting this option causes the baseline to be presented as transparent gray bars over the bars that represent the project’s current tasks.

When the baseline that is selected in the project is displayed in the Gantt chart, some additional information becomes visible for the tasks that are already completed or assigned. This information shows whether a task was behind or ahead of schedule and whether the cost of the time spent was over or under budget. These data points, as well as the transparent gray overlay, are also presented in the Gantt chart for the project phases that are included in the selected baseline and have either started or are already completed.