glossary — plain english
Baseline
The version of the plan everyone agreed to before the work started — kept frozen so you can see how far reality has drifted from it.
A baseline is a snapshot. When the plan is approved, you freeze a copy — every task, every date — and then let the live plan keep changing, because it will. The baseline doesn't manage anything. Its whole job is to remember.
Without one, every status update is a matter of vibes: nobody can say whether the project is late because nobody can point at what "on time" was supposed to look like. With one, "are we late?" becomes a checkable question — lay today's chart over the agreed one and the drift is right there, bar by bar.
On a big program, baselining is a formal ritual with change-control boards attached. On a normal project, it can be as simple as saving a copy of the chart the day everyone said yes. The tooling matters much less than the discipline of actually taking the snapshot before the first slip, not after it.
See it on a real chart
Describe your project in plain English and ganttchart.ai turns it into a shareable Gantt chart in seconds — every term on this page included. Or read the method first: the plain-English planning guide.