Project Management For Dummies®

Appendix A. Glossary

accountability: Feed back of consequences to people based on their performance.

activities plan: A table that lists planned project activities with their start and end dates.

activities report: A table that lists project activities with their planned start and end dates and their actual start and end dates.

activity: The work required to move from one event to the next in a project.

activity‐in‐the‐box diagram: A network diagram format in which boxes represent events and activities.

activity‐on‐arrow diagram: A network diagram format in which circles represent events and arrows represent activities.

assumption: A statement about uncertain information that you take as fact as you conceive, plan, and perform a project.

audience: A person or group that supports, is affected by, or is interested in a project.

authority: The ability to make binding decisions about a project's products, schedule, resources, and work packages.

availability: The portion of time a person is actually on the job, as opposed to on leave.

background: How and why a project was created, by whom, and its organizational and external environmental contexts; the why of a project.

backing in: The process of identifying activities and estimates of duration that equal the project's allotted time by starting at the end of a project and working back toward the beginning.

backward pass: The process of calculating latest allowable start and finish dates for each activity by beginning at the end of a project and ...