TLDR: How do we do baselines in Asana?
How are people creating project schedule baselines in Asana?
I don’t see the functionality there quite yet.
But as a workaround, I was thinking that the easiest way would be to duplicate a section that houses the project schedule items.
My only frustration with this would be how Asana “sorts” items in timeline view when trying to sort by Due Date. It combines all items from every section.
And without sorting, the schedule items get placed in the timeline view a bit funky. Certainly not how any one would naturally want to view them. I find this acceptable for simpler projects. But once I am doing something more complicated, its frustrating to have to “find” the items in the timeline view.
3 Likes
Hi @FenwayJohnny,
Currently the way you have suggested is how I have suggested previously baselines be shown. It is a shame you cannot exclude that section when sorting by due date.
You could duplicate then archive the baseline project and then compare the two? Or if you use milestones, add both to a portfolio and then you can see the baseline of milestone vs the new dates of milestones.
Baselining is something often commented on in the community! 
1 Like
Thanks for chiming in @Danielle-GenD
Yea - I am sorta bumming out about how Asana is missing some pretty critical features for true Project Management.
I became a bit evangelical about Asana when I discovered it after being tortured by a few construction industry specific platforms.
And while Asana is still the king (imo) when it comes to getting down and dirty to just pushing through work…
I have come to understand it as more of a “to-do list” on steroids / “project management lite” software.
I can see how it might shine a lot brighter in the software domain or in a distributed team that needs to work quickly through smaller projects.
But its really falling flat for me as a user that needs it to pay more mind to project schedule health + the ability to communicate that schedule info into the physical world (printing).
I find myself on da daily basis, leaning towards dialing back my Asana dreams of building out a full fledged Construction PM platform within it, going back to a industry product, and maybe just using Asana as a tool for our small internal team to organize their personal to-do’s that occasionally require some collaboration.
6 Likes
Hey @FenwayJohnny
What I do now with baselining is use another hidden date custom field for the baseline then you can easily compare when needed those with the due date.
4 Likes
That’s smart! And now w the advanced formula field we can probably even add a “slippage” field to track performance against baseline.
Where does one get the time to do it all 
2 Likes
Once I have workshopped the schedule with all the team members and we have agreed to the schedule and deliverables I then create a copy to be used as the baseline.
1 Like
Just an update but the new Gantt view under the settings will now show the baseline.
2 Likes
Thank you, but I don’t see these options anywhere. What’s the master option to turn this on?
Welcome, @Benjamin44,
As shown in the screenshot above, when you’re in the Gantt tab in a project, you’ll see Gantt options for the menu shown (and the “…” menu also has some other options).
If you don’t see a Gantt tab, do this:
Thanks,
Larry
coming late to this topic. Am keen to understand if this worked for you? We are currently looking into how we can create Project Baselines for: Start Date, Go Live and Closure - our objective is to pull these into a formula to be able to calculate SPI (we will extract the data); and then have visibility to actual slippage and then analyse root cause of slippage (external factors ie business / vendor or us in Tech)
1 Like
Hi everyone.
Although the baseline in the Gantt is helpful, it would be also very good to have a new added column to the list view with the baseline dates.
Is that on the roadmap?