Do We Have Enough to Get There?

Glen is Vice President Program Planning and Controls, Niwot Ridge LLC.

  Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

A Performance Measurement Baseline can be used to determine if you have everything you need to complete your project, including money, time and resources. Here is an overview of what it looks like, along with some key related activities and desired outcomes to strengthen its credibility.

The first installment of this series — “5 Questions PMs Must Ask” — outlined the five immutable principles that project leaders and teams must address in order to succeed. This article explores the third question Do We Have Enough to Get There?

Once you’ve determined “What Does Done Look Like?” for your project and “How Do We Get There?”, the next question becomes “Do We Have Enough of Everything to Get There?” By everything, we mean time, money, resources, facilities, support — everything and anything that is needed by the project.

So how do we know what we need? The answer to that comes from the Performance Measurement Baseline (PMB). The PMB is a time-phased budget plan for accomplishing work, against which contract performance is measured. It includes the budgets assigned to scheduled control accounts and the applicable indirect budgets. What this means is we know what work we need to perform, in what order we need to perform it, what we have budgeted for performing it, and, most important, what the …

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