The Project Management Glossary

Actual Cost is the simplest of the three EVM numbers: the total money actually spent to accomplish the work co...

The benefits management plan defines each intended benefit, how and when it will be measured, who owns it, and...

Benefits realization is the discipline of ensuring a project or program actually produces the business value t...

Budget at Completion is the total authorized budget for the entire project — the finish-line number all other...

The business case is the document that justifies the investment: the problem or opportunity, the options consi...

The Change Control Board is the group with the authority to approve, defer, or reject change requests — typica...

Contingency reserve is time or money set aside for identified risks — the "known unknowns" already sitting in...

CPI measures cost efficiency: how much value the project earns for every dollar spent. A CPI of 1.0 means you'...

Cost Variance is the dollar gap between the value of the work performed and what it cost: negative means over...

Crashing is schedule compression by adding resources to critical path activities — more people, overtime, prem...

The critical path is the longest sequence of dependent activities through a project — and therefore the shorte...

The Critical Path Method is the analytical technique behind the critical path: a forward pass through the netw...

The Definition of Done is the team's shared, explicit checklist of what "complete" means for every increment —...

Earned Value is the budgeted worth of the work actually completed — not what you spent, but what the finished...

Earned Value Management is the technique that answers the question every sponsor eventually asks: "You've spen...

Estimate at Completion is the forecast of what the whole project will actually cost, given performance so far....

Estimate to Complete answers the forward-looking question: "from this point, how much more money do we need to...

Fast tracking compresses the schedule by performing activities in parallel that were planned in sequence. It c...

Float (also called slack) is how long an activity can be delayed without pushing the project's finish date. Ac...

Free float is the tighter cousin of total float: how long an activity can slip without delaying the early star...

Gold plating is adding features or polish the customer never asked for — extra scope injected by the team itse...

Kanban is a flow-based method: visualize the work on a board, limit how much is in progress at once, and conti...

Lessons learned is the discipline of capturing what worked and what didn't — throughout the project, not just...

Management reserve is budget or schedule held for the truly unforeseen — the "unknown unknowns" no risk worksh...

An MVP is the smallest version of a product that delivers real value to real users while maximizing what the t...

Monte Carlo simulation is a quantitative risk technique that runs a project model thousands of times with rand...

Planned Value is the authorized budget for the work scheduled to be done by a given date — in plain terms, "wh...

The power/interest grid classifies stakeholders along two axes — their power over the project and their intere...

The product backlog is the single, ordered list of everything that might be built — features, fixes, improveme...

A RACI chart maps every activity to who is Responsible (does the work), Accountable (owns the outcome — exactl...

The retrospective is the recurring meeting — end of every sprint — where the team inspects its own process: wh...

Risk appetite is how much uncertainty an organization is willing to accept in pursuit of its objectives — a st...

The risk owner is the single named person accountable for monitoring a specific risk and executing its respons...

The risk register is the living log of identified risks: each entry with its description, probability, impact,...

A risk threshold is the measurable line drawn from risk appetite — the specific level of exposure above which...

The schedule baseline is the approved version of the schedule — the fixed reference that actual progress is me...

SPI measures schedule efficiency: the rate at which work is actually being completed versus the rate the plan...

Schedule Variance expresses schedule position in dollars: the value of work completed minus the value of work...

The scope baseline is the approved definition of what the project will deliver: the scope statement, the WBS,...

Scope creep is the uncontrolled growth of project scope — additions that bypass change control, arriving one "...

Servant leadership inverts the traditional pyramid: the leader's job is to serve the team — removing impedimen...

A sprint (or iteration) is a short, fixed-length timebox — commonly two weeks — in which the team plans, build...

The stakeholder register is the catalog of everyone who can affect or be affected by the project — with their...

Story points are a relative, unitless measure of effort — this item is roughly twice that one — covering compl...

TCPI is the efficiency the project must achieve on all remaining work to finish within a target budget — essen...

A user story is a small, plain-language statement of need from the user's perspective — classically "As a [rol...

Variance at Completion is the projected difference between the original budget and the forecast final cost — t...

Velocity is the amount of work (usually story points) a team actually completes per sprint, averaged over rece...

Work-in-progress limits cap how many items can occupy a workflow stage at once. They feel counterintuitive — l...

The WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the total project scope into smaller, manageable pieces — everythin...

A work package is the lowest level of the WBS — a chunk of work small enough to be reliably estimated for cost...