In project management there are many baselines.
For the PMP exam, the ones to keep in mind are the scope baseline, the schedule baseline, and the cost baseline, together these three make up the performance baseline.
What is a baseline, you might ask? It is the standard to which the performance of the project will be measured.
It makes up the basis for which measurements can be made.
What Does It Contain? The scope baseline includes the project scope statement, the work breakdown structure (WBS) and WBS dictionary.
If there are work packages that do not get performed or if they do not fulfill the requirements set out for them, then the scope baseline is not met.
The performance of the PM as well as the rest of the team is derived from how well the project conforms to this baseline.
How Does the WBS Fit Into This? The work breakdown structure is how the work on the project is decomposed.
A project may be summarized in a sentence or two, but the work to complete the project must be broken down into much smaller and more manageable pieces.
As the pieces are broken down, they finally get to a point where realistic and manageable estimates of time and cost can be made.
This juncture in the work breakdown structure is called the control accounts.
A summary of the control accounts should result in concise estimates of time and cost for the project.
The work, however, may still be broken down further.
The next recognizably different decomposition will be the work packages.
Because the work packages are small and conform to the graphical layout of the WBS, the details of the packages are kept separately on individual forms in the WBS dictionary.
The next step is to decompose the packages into activities, now the activities can be performed by the project team.