Target Date vs Baseline in Project Management Office template

Duraid

The project plan in PMO template have Target Start Date and Target End Date which seem to serve the same purpose as the Baseline Start and Baseline Finish. Are they redundant or am i missing something?

dojones

Target Start Date and Target End Date are used to determine Schedule Health. Baseline Start and Baseline Finish will show up in the Gannt chart as a line under the bar to illustrate the baseline compared to current plan.

Duraid

They both server the same purpose of comparing planned vs actual dates. However, Baseline dates are not editable and are managed by smartsheet while Target dates are managed by the user.

Matt Johnson

Baseline dates are for capturing the dates that were determined at the beginning of a project.

Planned / Target dates are for planning/adjusting tasks during the project. So if there's weather delays or something happens ahead of schedule, these dates can be updated without losing the original baseline dates.

In my experience, the Baseline dates vs Actual dates are most valuable when comparing multiple projects, to update durations on tasks. For example: If permitting was estimated to take 6 weeks and it got done in 5 weeks more than 80% of the time, that could justify shortening that duration on the template for projects going forward.