A project manager’s glossary

Short definitions of terms used in projects. Where a topic has its own article, there is a link.

Projects and governance

• Project — temporary work with a unique result, a deadline and a budget.
• Programme — a group of related projects that together deliver a shared benefit.
• Portfolio — all of an organisation’s projects and programmes managed together: selected, prioritised and resourced.
• Project charter — a short document that starts a project: goal, scope, deadline, budget, project manager, sponsor.
• Sponsor — a senior person accountable for the project being needed and resourced.
• Stakeholders — everyone the project affects or who affects it.
• Project life cycle — the phases from initiation to closure. See “Project management phases”.
• Project management plan — a document on how the project will be run and controlled. See the article on the plan.

Planning

• WBS (work breakdown structure) — the project result split into ever smaller parts. See “The work breakdown structure”.
• Work package — the lowest level of the WBS that can be estimated, assigned and controlled.
• Task — a specific piece of work with an owner and a date.
• Milestone — a checkpoint with no duration: “contract signed”, “pilot launched”.
• Duration — how many working days a piece of work takes.
• Effort — how many person-hours or person-days the work needs. Not the same as duration.
• Dependency — a rule that one piece of work depends on another: finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, start-to-finish.
• Lead and lag — a shift on a dependency: start N days before the predecessor finishes, or N days after.
• Gantt chart — project work as bars on a timeline. See “How to make a Gantt chart”.
• Critical path — the longest chain of dependent work, which sets the project end date. See “The critical path in plain words”.
• Float (slack) — how long work can slip without moving the project end date.
• Production calendar — working and non-working days, with holidays and moved weekends.
• Baseline — the approved version of the dates the forecast is compared with. See “Baseline and forecast”.
• Forecast — dates worked out from the current state of the project.
• RACI — a responsibility matrix: who does the work (Responsible), who answers for the result (Accountable), who is consulted (Consulted), who is kept informed (Informed).

Control

• Schedule variance — the gap between the forecast and the baseline date.
• Risk — an event that may happen and affect the project.
• Issue (problem) — an event that has already happened and is hurting the project.
• Assumption — something taken as true without checking.
• RAID — a combined log of Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies.
• Risk register — a list of risks with ratings, owners and responses. See “The project risk register”.
• Risk matrix — a probability × impact grid that sorts risks into zones.
• Open issue — a question that needs a decision, with an owner and a due date.
• Change control — the way changes of scope, date or budget are proposed, assessed and approved.
• Earned value management (EVM) — a method comparing the planned value of work, the value of work actually done and actual cost, to measure slippage and overspend.
• Status report — a short regular summary: what is done, what is late, what decisions are needed.

Agile

• Agile — a family of approaches with short cycles, frequent delivery and adapting to change.
• Scrum — an agile framework with sprints, a backlog and three roles. See “Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban and hybrid”.
• Sprint — a Scrum iteration of one to four weeks.
• Backlog — a prioritised list of work.
• Kanban — an approach where work flows across a board and work in progress is limited.
• Retrospective — a team meeting on what to improve in how it works.

Where to use it

In Etapero most of these ideas are working tools: a work breakdown and Gantt chart with dependencies, critical path, baselines and production calendars, a register of risks, issues and assumptions with a matrix, open issues with decisions, and a project portfolio.