Calculating Slippage via Baselines

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Within your projects, each of your tasks have a Planned Start Date as well as a Planned Completion/Due Date. Typically these dates could change for multiple reasons such as dependencies, delays, or changes in prioritization. As you change dates in your project plan, you might want to understand how your current project plan compares to the plan, let’s say a week or two ago. That’s where baselines come in. Baselines are a snapshot of your project plan and key pieces of information. These snapshots will allow you to compare information from the current plan, to the original plan, or any other point in time, to identify problem tasks, scope creep, and other trends over time. See more on baselines here. 

Calculating ‘Slippage’ is a way you can see how each individual task compares to the original Project plan. This requires you to capture at least one baseline for a project. The specific baseline you want to compare your current project to should be marked as the “Default Baseline”: 

new Workfront experience:

Workfront Classic:

When a Default Baseline is created, an object called “Default Baseline Task” is also created with its own set of fields. These are task fields/information related to the project plan when the Default Baseline was taken, and allow you to compare current tasks to that of the default baseline. 

Now that you’ve defined the baseline and baseline tasks, you can create a calculated field(s) at the task level to numerically see the comparisons. 

Create a number calculated field at the task level, and call it “Slippage” or whatever you’d like to call the difference. 

Then use this calculation: 

ROUND(DATEDIFF(Default Baseline Task.Planned Completion Date,Planned Completion Date),0)

This specific calculation represents the difference (in days) between the current planned completion dates to that of the original plan or when the default baseline was taken. A negative value means that your current plan has slipped compared to the original. A positive value means that you’re actually ahead of the original schedule. A zero value means that they have stayed the same. 

Keep in mind that the above calculation is comparing ‘Planned Completion Dates’. You can substitute different fields to compare different dates like ‘Planned Start Date’ or values like ‘Planned Hours’. 

A great way to visualize this slippage is to add a couple of fields into a view inside of your project plan. Add the “Default Baseline Task.Planned Completion Date” (or whatever value you are comparing) as well as the new “Slippage” calculated field. 

NWE:

Classic:

*Tip: Add conditional formatting to your “Slippage” field to highlight tasks that are behind!