Baselines and variance

Capture the promise

A baseline is a frozen snapshot of every task's planned dates and durations at a moment you choose — typically the day the plan is committed. Capture it from the Baselines tab. The live plan keeps moving; the baseline doesn't. That's the whole point: yesterday's promise stays visible against today's reality, as a ghost bar under each task.

Track progress

Record percent complete on tasks as work happens. Earned-value metrics come for free once you have a baseline, assignments, and progress: planned value, earned value, and schedule variance per task and rolled up the WBS.

Read variance honestly

• Start/finish variance — working-day deltas between baseline and current dates, per task. Sortable: the biggest slips float to the top.
• Schedule variance (EV − PV) — negative means behind the promise in value terms, not just dates.
• The combination that matters — a task that's late and on the critical path is a finish-date problem; a late task with slack is a watch item. The variance view shows both axes so you triage in seconds.

Re-baselining

When scope genuinely changes, capture a new baseline rather than living with noise — Foreweave keeps prior baselines, so "promise v1 vs v2 vs reality" remains an answerable question. Every capture records who took it and, if you fill the box, why. Re-baselining to hide slippage, on the other hand, is visible in the audit history. We consider that a feature.

Compare two baselines

Variance answers "is execution behind the plan?". Comparing two baselines answers the different question a gate review opens with: what changed in the plan itself since we last re-baselined? Pick a "From" and a "To" baseline on the Baselines tab and you get, per task, how much the start, finish and duration moved in working days — summary rows included, so a phase-level slip reads at the phase — plus the tasks added or removed between the two, and which tasks moved onto or off the critical path.

Renaming a task doesn't confuse it: a rename shows as one changed row, not a deletion plus an addition. Neither does deleting one — a baseline keeps its own record of every task it captured, so a task removed from the plan still shows up as "removed" under the name it had at the time.

Slip trend

Pick a task or gate and the slip trend plots its finish date across every baseline you've captured, in capture order, ending at the current forecast. A date that keeps being re-planned draws a staircase — the release-over-release view that a table of dates doesn't make obvious. A gap means the task didn't exist in that baseline; nothing is invented to fill it.

See several baselines at once

Tick a few baselines and they appear on the Gantt as faded ghost lanes beneath each task's live bar, newest nearest the bar — so a task's drift across successive re-baselines reads inline, without leaving the chart. Four at a time, which is what a row can show while keeping each lane legible. The slip trend has a matching mode: switch it to compare all milestones and every gate is plotted on one set of axes, so "are we slipping across the board, or is it one chain?" is a glance rather than an investigation.

Comparisons and trends are read-only. They never re-schedule the plan, so opening them can't change anything.