Choosing how to start

There is more than one way to produce a first baseline, and the right one depends on what you already have written down.

Answer the questions

The guided path walks you through the assessment domain by domain. It takes the longest and produces the most considered result, because someone is thinking about each answer. Best when your program is not heavily documented, or when you want the conversation the questions provoke.

Import what you have

If you have already assessed yourself somewhere else, bring it in from a spreadsheet. You review what was matched before anything is written, so an import never silently overwrites a considered answer with a worse one. Best when you have a recent assessment in another format.

Start from your documents

The accelerated path reads the policies and procedures you already have and proposes answers from them, which you then review. It is the fastest route to a defensible baseline when your program is well documented, and it has the useful side effect of showing you where your documentation does not say what you assumed.

Nothing is applied without review on any path.

You can change your mind

The paths are not exclusive. Import what you have, then answer the gaps by hand. Start from documents and correct what they got wrong. What matters is that the finished baseline reflects reality, not which route produced it.

Next: Completing your first baseline.