Glossary of Project Management Terms
The following glossary contains 60 common words in project management.
| # | Term | Description |
| 1 | Agile | A management philosophy that focuses on value and customer interactions where requirements evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional teams. The term was popularized in the Agile Manifesto. |
| 2 | Agile Mindset | An agile mindset is the set of attitudes supporting an agile working environment. These include respect, collaboration, improvement and learning cycles, pride in ownership, focus on delivering value, and the ability to adapt to change. |
| 3 | Benefits Management | A set of deliberate processes of managing an endeavor’s planned benefits, intended outcomes, and results throughout the project, program, or portfolio life cycle. |
| 4 | Budget | The approved estimate for the total project, program, or portfolio costs that is inclusive of the cost of all planned components. It also includes the total amount of component cost estimates, contingency reserves, and sometimes the management reserve as well. |
| 5 | Business Case | A feasibility report for projects, programs, and portfolios used to establish the rationale for undertaking the endeavor. |
| 6 | Business Requirement Documents (BRD) | A document that identifies and lists all the business level requirements of a project. In the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), business requirements are further refined, analyzed, and transformed into functional requirements. |
| 7 | Capacity Management | The processes for managing and optimizing project, program, and portfolio resources between the demands of existing work and resource requirements to fulfill the needs of the initiative. |
| 8 | Change Control | The process of managing project change, including key documents, deliverables, and baselines associated with the initiative. The process includes the identification, documentation, change assessment, and decision-making. |
| 9 | Change Management | The techniques, tools, and processes for managing the people side of the organizational change in order to accomplish the strategic business objectives. |
| 10 | Charter | A document that includes the specification and authorization pertaining to the structure of a specific project, program, or portfolio. Issued by a sponsor, this document also associates the endeavor to the goals and objectives of the organization. The charter grants formal authorization to the project, program, or portfolio manager to guide and oversee activities within the context of organizational, contractual, and third party resources. The Program or Portfolio Charter also connects the strategic goals and objectives of the organization with the endeavor. |
| 11 | Communication Management | The process of developing and implementing a project, program, or portfolio communication management plan, including the processes the creation, collection, dissemination, storage, retrieval, and disposition of information. |
| 12 | Conflict | Escalating disagreements arising from differences in priorities, processes, and personal or organizational views and values. If left alone, conflicts can spiral into larger conflicts with vicious negative cycles feeding and intensifying themselves. |
| 13 | Critical Path | The longest activity sequence of a project or program that determines the shortest possible duration to complete the endeavor. |
| 14 | Culture | The system of values, behaviors, attitudes, and traditions that are often unspoken in an organization, which affects the planning and execution of projects, programs, and portfolios. |
| 15 | Deliverable | Any distinct and unique element, product, item, or result that is developed for delivery at the completion of a particular project activity, component, task, or at the completion of the whole project. |
| 16 | Earned Value Management (EVM) | The project management performance methodology that provides integrated management of scope, schedule, and resource measurements to evaluate a project and program performance and progress. |
| 17 | Extreme Programming (XP) | An agile software development technique with short release cycles that collectively lead to a better quality of software with enhanced responsiveness to varying demands of the clients. |
| 18 | Feature-driven Development | An agile software development method that focuses on deliver customer-driven features, especially those requirements that are small but valuable, incrementally. |
| 19 | Gantt Chart | A bar chart that displays information regarding the project schedule where the horizontal axis represents dates, the vertical axis represents activities, and the horizontal bar shows the activity duration in accordance with their finish and start dates. Gantt charts can also show activity dependency relationships. |
| 20 | Governance | The alignment of project, program, or portfolio goals with the sponsoring organization’s strategy through sound decision-making processes on authorization, oversight, resource allocation, and change management. |
| 21 | Hybrid Approach | A framework based on multiple agile and non-agile components, typically resulting in a non-agile output that manifests some benefits of applying agile. |
| 22 | Integration Management | A collection of processes required to ensure that the various elements of the project, program, or portfolio are properly organized and coordinated. |
| 23 | Issue | An occurring or occurred incident of a project or program that if unmanaged will affect the schedule, scope, cost, resources, or other project parameters. |
| 24 | Iterative Life Cycle | An approach to project implementation in which the finished product is built incrementally through multiple cycles. Each cycle should be of value to the customer. |
| 25 | Just Do It | This is an approach to implementing project by focusing on action and often without any detailed planning or method. |
| 26 | Kanban Method | An agile technique based on the philosophy that empowered knowledge workers would “pull” the work through the process from beginning to completion. This is opposed to the traditional approach of managers “pushing” work through the process. |
| 27 | Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) | A product development approach based on Scrum, which extends and scales Scrum for larger products. |
| 28 | Lean Software Development (LSD) | An adaptation of the Lean management principles and activities toward software development. It is aimed at achieving better speed, higher quality, and greater client satisfaction. |
| 29 | Minimal Viable Product (MVP) | This is an important concept from lean management and entrepreneurship that emphasizes developing products with the least effort in which customers are willing to pay. By learning from customer feedback that would translate to more frequent product releases, the product achieves an accelerated development cycle. |
| 30 | Operation | The business function of managing the regular, often cyclical and routine activities of an organization. |
| 31 | Organizational Capabilities | The ability of an organization to leverage its people, processes, systems, and strategies to transform ideas, intended goals, and objectives into tangible results and outcomes. |
| 32 | Organizational Change Management (OCM) | An organizational approach to transforming organizations or teams or shifting individuals mindsets and behaviors from the current state to the desired future state. |
| 33 | Phase | A group of related activities that collectively culminate in the completion of one or multiple deliverables. |
| 34 | Portfolio | A logical collection of programs, projects, operations, subsidiary portfolios, and other related work that should be managed collectively to achieve one or more of organizational and strategic goals and objectives. |
| 35 | Portfolio Management (PfM) | The centralized streamlining of one or multiple portfolios for the achievement of strategic goals and objectives by incorporating the concepts of identifying, prioritizing, authorizing, monitoring, and controlling of the entirety of the portfolio. |
| 36 | Procurement Management | The practice of identifying, evaluating, and managing supply chain processes through the application of knowledge, skills, and tools required for the effective and efficient implementation of a project, program, and portfolio. |
| 37 | Product | A result, outcome, or artifact at the successful completion of a project or program. |
| 38 | Program | A collection of highly related components, such as sub-programs, projects, and other activities. When these components are managed as a program, they can achieve great value and benefits not possible if they were managed separately. |
| 39 | Project | A time-limited, purpose-driven, and often unique endeavor intended to create an outcome, service, product, or deliverable. |
| 40 | Project Management | A management discipline specialized for overseeing projects. Project management includes the activities associated with initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing the work for meeting the project goals and objectives by applying skills, knowledge, techniques, and tools to project activities and tasks. |
| 41 | Quality | The extent to which a set of attributes produced by projects and programs meet the stakeholder, business, functional, non-functional, and transition requirements. |
| 42 | Quality Management | The process for ensuring that all project and program activities necessary to design, plan, and implement an initiative are effective and efficient with respect to the purpose of the objective and its performance. |
| 43 | RACI / Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) | A specific type of Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) that is also an acronym where R stands for Responsibility, A for Accountability, C for Consulted, and I for Informed. |
| 44 | Requirement | A condition or capability that is required to be present in a product, service, or result to satisfy a contract or other formally imposed requirement. Commonly categorized as stakeholder, business, functional, non-functional, and transition. |
| 45 | Resource Management | The practice of identifying, evaluating, and managing human and non-human resources required for the successful planning and implementation of a project, program, and portfolio. |
| 46 | Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) | A table that describes a project or program resource assignments on tasks, activities, deliverables, or work packages. |
| 47 | Risk | A potentiality that, if it materializes, can have an impact on one or multiple objectives negatively or positively, in the form of resources, performance, quality, or timeline. |
| 48 | Risk Management | The practice of identifying, evaluating, prioritizing, and monitoring unknown and probable events that may affect projects, programs, and portfolios. Once prioritized, selective risks are analyzed further to develop a risk response plan and when necessary implement them to mitigate threats and exploit opportunities. |
| 49 | Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) | A set of integrated workflow and patterns intended to guide lean and agile practices and scale them for enterprises. |
| 50 | Schedule Management | A project management work effort that identifies and establishes the sequencing and timing of project activities in order to develop the project, program, or portfolio schedule, identify milestones, enable tracking of progress, and document planned accomplishments. Collectively the goal is to produce the intended deliverables, benefits, and value. |
| 51 | Scope Management | A deliberate activity that identifies, defines, develops, tracks, controls, and validates the agreed upon work to fulfill the requirements of a project, program, or portfolio. |
| 52 | Scope Statement | The description of the project, program, or portfolio scope that includes objectives, assumptions, deliverables, and constraints. |
| 53 | Scrum | A popular agile project management framework that emphasizes daily communication, flexible assessment of work, short and timeboxed development and deployment cycles, and multiple iterations (called sprints). |
| 54 | Stakeholder | An organization, group, or individual that has the capacity to influence, be affected by, or consider itself under the influence of, an outcome, activity, or decision of a portfolio, program, or project. |
| 55 | Stakeholder Engagement | The process of managing people’s expectations who may be affected or influenced by a project, program, or portfolio. |
| 56 | Strategy Alignment | Project, program, and portfolio management activities responsible for linking and integrating the organizational strategy with the project, program, and portfolio strategy and practices. |
| 57 | Strategy Implementation | A procedure of putting strategies and plans into action for achieving the desired business objectives. It can be in the form of a written document that states the processes and steps required for reaching goals of the plan and also includes progress and feedback reports for ensuring effective progress. |
| 58 | Team Building | The process of creating effective teams by thoughtful team formation, establishing team ground rules, conflict resolution, and promotion of cooperation and collaboration. |
| 59 | Waterfall or Predictive Approach | A framework of performing work based on the deliberate and detailed planning of the work typically applied through the life cycle of a project, program, or portfolio. |
| 60 | Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) | A hierarchical breakdown of the work scope required to be executed by the team for creating the deliverables and outcomes as well as for achieving the particular project goals and objectives. |