A Target Without a Credible Baseline Is Just a Number
Most projects have targets.
A completion date.
A budget.
A set of milestones.
Maybe a few benefits that the project is expected to deliver.
All useful.
But a target only really means something if you have a credible view of where you are starting from.
And that is where things often start to go wrong.
A target is not a plan
It is quite easy to put a date in a project plan.
It is quite easy to agree a budget.
It is quite easy to say that something needs to be delivered by the end of October.
None of that means the project can actually do it.
Before a target means anything, you need to understand the position you are starting from.
What has actually been agreed?
What work still needs to be done?
Who is available to do it?
What are the dependencies?
What assumptions have been made?
What risks are already obvious?
And how much progress has really been made?
Without that, you can still have a target.
You just do not know whether it is realistic.
This is where false confidence creeps in
Once a date or target has been agreed, reporting usually starts.
Are we on track?
Are we behind?
How much have we completed?
Is the project red, amber or green?
All reasonable questions.
But they only help if the thing you are measuring against was credible in the first place.
You can report very accurately against a bad plan.
You can say a project is 70% complete when nobody has really defined what the remaining 30% involves.
You can show green because the current activities are moving while a major dependency has still not been resolved.
The reporting can look fine.
The project may still be in trouble.
This does not need to become complicated
A smaller project does not need a huge baseline document or a project controls team.
It just needs enough clarity to know whether the target stacks up.
What are we delivering?
What needs to happen?
Who is doing it?
What are we relying on?
What could get in the way?
And does the target still make sense once we know all of that?
That is enough to give you something useful to manage against.
The problem often appears later
This becomes particularly obvious when a project starts slipping.
The normal response is to push harder.
More meetings.
More actions.
More reporting.
More pressure on the team.
Sometimes that is needed.
But sometimes the better question is much simpler.
Was the original baseline ever credible?
Because if it was not, the team may not suddenly have become poor at delivery.
They may simply be working against a target that was never properly grounded in reality.
No Fluff takeaway
When a project starts struggling, do not automatically assume the answer is more pressure, more meetings or more reporting.
Go back and check the baseline.
Was the original plan realistic?
Was the work properly understood?
Were the resources really available?
Were the dependencies and risks visible?
Because if the baseline was never credible, pushing harder against it will not fix the problem.
Sometimes the first step in recovering a project is not getting it back to the original target.
It is establishing a target that can actually be delivered.
Not sure what is really causing the problem?
When a project is struggling, it is not always obvious whether the issue is the plan, the resources, the governance, the risks, the team or something else entirely.
The No Fluff Project Assessment is designed to help identify where the real problems are and where attention is needed most.
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