Glossary of Key Terms taught in this course

Agile Approach: A project management approach that focuses on flexibility, collaboration, and iterative development, responding to change rather than rigidly following a predefined plan.

Baseline: A fixed reference point, in time, against which project performance can be measured. The three main types are scope, cost, and schedule baselines.

Budget at Completion (BAC): The total approved budget for the project, including all costs, contingency reserves, and management reserves.

Business Case: A document that justifies the need for a project by explaining its benefits, costs, and alignment with organizational strategy.

Change Control: A process of identifying, documenting, and managing changes to the project scope, schedule, or budget, aiming to reduce the impact of negative changes.

Contingency Reserve: Funds set aside to cover costs associated with planned responses to identified risks.

Control Account: A management control point where scope, budget, and schedule are integrated and compared with the actual performance.

Crashing: A schedule compression technique to reduce project duration by adding resources to critical path activities, which increases risk and costs.

Critical Path: The longest sequence of activities in a project that determines the shortest time needed to complete the project.

Decomposition: The technique of breaking down a project’s scope into smaller, manageable components for ease of planning and execution.

Deliverable: Any unique and verifiable product, result, or capability produced to complete a process, phase, or project.

Earned Value (EV): The measure of value for the completed work at a given point in time, as compared to the planned budget for that work.

Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEF): Conditions, not under the control of the project team, that influence the project, such as regulations, market conditions, or political climate.

Fast Tracking: A schedule compression technique that involves doing activities in parallel that are usually done sequentially, which increases risk.

Gold Plating: Adding features or functionality that exceed the project’s requirements and do not add significant value.

Lessons Learned: Documentation of insights and experiences from a project that can be used to improve future projects.

Management Reserve: Funds set aside to cover unplanned changes or unforeseen events that were not identified during risk identification and planning.

Matrix Environment: An organizational structure that combines functional and projectized organizations, often sharing authority between functional and project managers.

Organizational Process Assets (OPA): An organization’s internal policies, procedures, guidelines, templates, systems, and best practices that can be used to manage a project.

Plan Value (PV): The cost of work that has been authorized and budgeted for a scheduled activity or WBS component in a given time frame.

Portfolio: A collection of programs, projects, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives.

Program: A group of related projects, subprograms, and program activities managed in a coordinated way to achieve strategic benefits.

Project: A temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service, or result with a defined start and end.

Project Charter: A formal document that authorizes a project, establishes the project manager’s authority, and outlines high-level requirements.

Project Constraint: Any limitation that restricts the actions of the project manager and team, such as time, budget, or scope.

Project Management: The application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements.

Project Management Plan: A comprehensive document that integrates all individual management plans and provides guidelines for the project’s execution, monitoring, and control.

Project Schedule: A document that establishes the start and end dates for project activities and milestones, and the sequence for the various steps.

Quality: The measure of to what extent you are satisfying the customer by meeting their requirements on the project.

Requirements Traceability Matrix: A document that links requirements to their origin and tracks them throughout the project lifecycle.

Risk: An uncertain event that, if it occurs, can have a positive or negative effect on project objectives.

Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS): A hierarchical structure for categorizing and managing project risks.

Risk Register: A document containing information about identified risks, their analysis, and response strategies.

Scope: The work that must be done to deliver the project, or product or service.

Scope Baseline: A group of documents that collectively describe the project scope.

Scope Creep: Changes to the project scope that are not approved by the project stakeholders or included in the project baseline.

Schedule Performance Index (SPI): The ratio of the earned value to the planned value, indicating whether the project is on, behind, or ahead of schedule.

Scheduled Variance (SV): The difference between the earned value and planned value that indicates by how much the team has lagged behind in delivering the expected project value.

Stakeholder: Any individual, group, or organization that can affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a project.

Stakeholder Register: A document that identifies key project stakeholders and includes information about their roles, influence, and expectations.

System of Value Delivery: A mechanism by which organizations formulate, move, and deliver value from concept to cash through portfolios, programs, projects, and operations.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): A deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the project work into manageable components and visualizes the full scope of the project.

Work Package: The smallest unit of work in the WBS that can be accurately estimated for resources, cost, and time.