I am looking for advice on how to manage project baseline information.
I am the manager of a newly created project management office at my company. I maintain a corporate-level product development plan which includes all projects.
My company creates an initial project baseline for cost and schedule data. However, throughout the project lifecycle I receive many requests to “re-baseline” the data.
The main cause of this is accountability. PMs, FMs, Team Members, Sponsors, etc., are held accountable for not exceeding variance thresholds between actual data and the baseline data. Unfortunately, with the many different levels of accountability I find that someone is always requesting a re-baseline of the data because they had no control over it. For example, a team member had no control over senior management changing the priority of the project and delaying the schedule.
I’d like to have only one baseline…EVER, document reasons for the variances if they exceed the defined thresholds, and then let all the different layers determine for themselves how they will hold their staff accountable.
A lot of people don’t want to do this.
How does everyone else handle this situation?
Help!