Your Project Management Coach: Best Practices for Managing Projects in the Real World

Glossary

Activity — Work identified at levels higher than the work package in the work breakdown structure — for example, summary tasks describing phases or subsystems. In some organizations, however, “activity” is synonymous with task or work package.

Actual cost (AC) — How much has been spent for the work completed up to the status date.

Agile project management — A variation of iterative project management in which the solution is gradually identified over successive rotations throughout the project. Partial yet production-quality solutions are completed with each iteration, allowing for quicker realization of customer benefits and feedback.

Assumption — A condition that will affect the project, although the specifics of the condition are not yet known. For the purposes of planning, the specifics are assumed and called out as an assumption.

Baseline documents — Items such as the project plan, requirements, schedule, and budget that the managing stakeholders have approved. After approval, any changes are controlled by the change management process. In addition, numeric data such as planned start and finish dates, as well as work and cost estimates, are available for later comparison against actual values.

Benefits realization — Outcomes of a project or the success criteria that indicate how a project achieved its goal. Benefits realization often happens well after project completion and is often expressed in terms of strategic business goals such as increased revenue, decreased ...