Glossary

Definitions of the key terms used throughout the course, in alphabetical order. Each entry is kept to one or two sentences; follow the cross-references for the module that develops it.

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A

Acceptance criteria — Specific, testable conditions that a deliverable must meet to be accepted. Developed in Module 09.

Activity — A defined unit of work in a schedule, usually derived from a work package. See Module 06.

Actual cost (AC) — In earned value, the money actually spent on work performed to date.

Agile — An umbrella term for approaches that deliver value iteratively and adapt to change, informed by the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. See Module 04.

Assumption — Something believed true but not confirmed; if false, it may invalidate the plan. Recorded separately from constraints.

B

Baseline — An approved version of a plan (scope, schedule, or cost) against which performance is measured. Changing a baseline is a deliberate, controlled act.

Budget — The approved amount of money available to a project, including any contingency reserve.

Business case — The justification for undertaking a project: the expected value, cost, and rationale. See Module 02.

Benefit owner — The person accountable for a benefit being achieved and measured, named in the business case at approval rather than at closure.

Benefits realisation — Measuring whether the intended benefit actually occurred after delivery, by the benefit owner, on a date set at approval.

C

Capacity planning — Deciding how much work an organisation or team can take on given the people available.

Change control — The process by which changes to a baseline are proposed, assessed, approved or rejected, and recorded.

Change control board — The body that decides changes above delegated limits. Where no limits are delegated, it becomes a queue for trivial changes.

Coordination cost — The capacity consumed by communication and alignment between teams, sites, or organisations. It grows faster than headcount.

Correlated risk — Risks that share a cause and therefore tend to occur together, making a register of individually scored risks understate exposure.

Cost of delay — The value lost per unit of time that work is not delivered. Used to prioritise work whose value decays quickly.

Charter — A short document that formally authorises a project and bounds it. Template: Project Charter.

Communication plan — A plan defining who receives which information, in what form, and how often. Template: Communications Plan.

Constraint — A fixed fact the project cannot change, such as a deadline, a required integration, or a budget ceiling.

Contingency plan — A prepared response to be executed if a specific risk occurs.

Contingency reserve — Budget or time set aside explicitly for known risks (distinct from general uncertainty, sometimes covered by a management reserve).

Coordination — The work of keeping interdependent people and teams aligned, especially as their number grows. See Module 12.

Conway's law — The observation that a system's design tends to mirror the communication structure of the organisation that built it. Named after Melvin Conway.

Cost performance index (CPI) — In earned value, CPI = EV / AC. Above 1 means spending less than planned for the work done.

Crashing — Shortening a schedule by adding resources to critical activities, usually increasing cost and adding coordination overhead.

Critical path — The longest sequence of dependent activities through a network diagram; it determines the shortest possible project duration, and its activities have no total float.

Cycle time — The elapsed time from starting a unit of work to finishing it.

D

Decision rights — Who is allowed to make which decisions, and within what limits.

Defect — A flaw in a work product that causes it to fail to meet a requirement or expectation.

Deliverable — A tangible or intangible output produced for the project or its stakeholders.

Dependency — A relationship in which one activity or project depends on another. May be mandatory, discretionary, or external.

Distributed team — A team whose members work in different locations or time zones, increasing coordination cost.

Duration — The elapsed calendar time an activity takes, distinct from effort.

Decision latency — The elapsed time between an escalation being raised and a decision being made. The governance cost that governance reporting rarely measures.

E

Earned value (EV) — The value of work actually completed, expressed in the project's budget terms. Central to measuring schedule and cost performance.

Effort — The amount of work required, typically measured in person-hours or person-days. Distinct from duration: two people can shorten duration without changing effort.

Escalation — Raising a problem or decision to someone with the authority to resolve it.

Estimate — A prediction of effort, duration, or cost. Should be expressed as a range where uncertainty is significant.

Estimate to complete (ETC) — The expected cost of the remaining work.

Evidence right — Contractually agreed access to the evidence that a deliverable was tested and accepted: test results, build records, defect data, or audit access.

F

Fast-tracking — Shortening a schedule by performing activities in parallel that would otherwise be sequential, at the cost of increased risk of rework.

Float (slack) — The amount of time an activity can be delayed without delaying the project (if total float) or its successor (if free float).

Functional requirement — A statement of what the system must do.

G–I

Gold plating — Adding features or quality beyond what was requested, usually without agreement, and usually at unplanned cost.

Governance — The structures and processes by which decisions are made, authority is exercised, and the project is held accountable.

Hybrid delivery — Combining predictive and adaptive practices within one project.

Impact — The severity of a risk's consequences if it occurs.

Increment — In Scrum, the concrete, usable step toward the product goal produced each sprint.

Issue — A problem that has already occurred, as opposed to a risk, which has not.

Goodhart's law — When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure: people optimise the number rather than the thing it described.

Handoff latency — Elapsed time added by transferring work between people, sites, or suppliers, which accumulates with each handoff in a plan.

Interface owner — The person accountable for a boundary between components, teams, or suppliers having one agreed, versioned definition and a change route.

K–L

Kanban — A flow-based method that makes work visible on a board and limits work in progress. See Module 04.

Lagging indicator — A measure that changes after the outcome it describes (for example, defects found in production).

Lead — The amount by which a successor activity can start ahead of its predecessor.

Leading indicator — A measure that changes before the outcome and can therefore inform decisions early (for example, work in progress).

Lean — A set of principles, originating in manufacturing, that emphasise delivering value, eliminating waste, and improving flow.

M–P

Metric — A measurement used to inform decisions. Every metric influences the behaviour of those it measures.

Milestone — A significant point in time, often with zero duration, marking completion of a key result.

Mitigation — Action taken to reduce a risk's probability or impact.

Network diagram — A diagram showing activities and their dependencies, used to find the critical path.

Over-allocation — Assigning more work to a person than they have capacity for.

Planned value (PV) — In earned value, the budgeted cost of the work scheduled to be completed by a given date.

Portfolio — A selected collection of projects and programmes managed together to meet strategic objectives. See Lesson 2.

Probability — The likelihood a risk occurs.

Procurement — Obtaining goods or services from an external provider, governed by a contract. See Module 12.

Product backlog — In Scrum, the ordered, evolving list of what is needed to improve the product.

Product owner — In Scrum, the person accountable for maximising product value and for managing the product backlog.

Programme — A group of related projects managed together to obtain benefits not available from managing them separately.

Project — A temporary effort to create a unique product, service, or result.

Project management plan — The integrated set of documents describing how the project will be executed, monitored, and controlled.

Project manager — The person accountable for leading the project through planning, coordination, measurement, and adaptation.

Post-implementation review — A scheduled assessment of outcomes and benefits after closure, owned by the benefit owner rather than by the project.

Principal and interest — In technical debt, the cost of fixing the shortcut and the ongoing cost of living with it.

Q–R

Quality — The degree to which a product meets agreed requirements and is fit for its purpose.

Quality assurance — Process-oriented activity that builds confidence that quality requirements will be met.

Quality control — Product-oriented activity that verifies deliverables against quality requirements.

RACI — A responsibility-assignment model: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. Template: RACI Matrix.

Requirement — A condition or capability the system must satisfy.

Resource levelling — Adjusting a schedule to resolve resource over-allocation, often extending duration.

Retrospective — A structured review of a period of work, producing specific, owned changes. Template: Retrospective.

Risk — An uncertain event that, if it occurs, has a positive (opportunity) or negative (threat) effect on objectives.

Risk matrix — A grid plotting probability against impact to prioritise risks.

Risk register — The record of identified risks, their assessment, owners, and responses. Template: Risk Register.

Rolling wave planning — Progressive elaboration: planning near-term work in detail while leaving longer-term work at a higher level.

Re-baselining — Approving a revised scope, schedule, or cost baseline. Honest only when the original baseline is retained for comparison and the cause and approval are recorded.

Recovery baseline — The revised plan against which a recovery is measured, with its own reserve and decision cadence.

Risk appetite — The amount and type of risk the organisation is willing to take to pursue its objectives; owned by the sponsoring executive.

Risk tolerance — The measurable deviation from plan accepted before action is required, agreed with the sponsor per measure.

S

Scope — The work and deliverables included in a project, and by implication what is excluded.

Scope baseline — The approved scope statement, work breakdown structure, and dictionary, against which scope changes are assessed.

Scope creep — Uncontrolled, incremental growth in scope, typically accepted without any adjustment to time, cost, or quality.

Schedule performance index (SPI) — In earned value, SPI = EV / PV. Above 1 means more work completed than planned.

Scrum — A widely used agile framework defined by a small set of roles, events, and artefacts. See Module 04.

Sponsor — The senior person who authorises the project and is accountable for its business outcome.

Sprint — In Scrum, a fixed-length iteration of one month or less in which an increment is produced.

Stakeholder — Anyone who affects, is affected by, or believes they are affected by the project.

Stakeholder register — The record of stakeholders, their influence, interest, and attitude. Template: Stakeholder Register.

Statement of work (SOW) — A document describing the work to be performed under a contract.

Status report — A periodic report of progress, variance, risks, and decisions needed. Template: Status Report.

Success criteria — Observable, testable statements defining what a successful outcome means.

Secondary risk — A new risk created by the response to another risk, which is why every response should be tested with "what has to go right for this to work?".

Stabilisation phase — A short opening period in a recovery in which no new work is accepted and immediate blockers are cleared, so that the revised plan rests on a predictable flow.

Sunk cost — Money already spent, which cannot be recovered and should not influence the next decision.

T–Z

Technical debt — The accumulated cost of shortcuts in design or implementation that make future change harder. Deliberate debt can be rational; unmanaged debt compounds.

Throughput — The rate at which work items are completed over a period.

Trigger — An observable event indicating that a risk is about to occur or has occurred, and that a planned response should be activated.

Triple constraint — The idea that scope, time, and cost (with quality as a result) are linked, so changing one forces a change in another. Different sources include different factors; the underlying principle is the important part.

Validation — Confirming that the product meets the intended need ("are we building the right thing?").

Variance — The difference between planned and actual performance, in schedule or cost.

Verification — Confirming that the product meets its stated requirements ("are we building the thing right?").

Work breakdown structure (WBS) — A hierarchical decomposition of scope into work packages. Template: Work Breakdown Structure.

Work in progress (WIP) limit — A cap on how many items are worked on at once, used to improve flow and expose bottlenecks.

Work package — The lowest level of a WBS: a chunk of work small enough to estimate, assign, and track.

Working agreement — The explicit rules — response times, decision ownership, meeting hours, where artefacts live — that substitute for shared context in distributed teams.