Glossary

As-of is the single date every report and page is calculated for, so numbers never quietly drift while you read them.

Every calculation in Driftless takes an as-of date as an explicit input rather than reading the clock, so a report regenerated later for the same as-of comes back byte-identical.

See also: Baseline.

BAC is short for budget at completion, the total amount a project was originally budgeted to cost.

It is revised when an approved change request moves the baseline, but it does not drift with a project's day-to-day outlook the way EAC does -- only an approved change updates it.

See also: EAC.

Where you meet it: Earned Value Analysis.

Backlog is the full list of work not yet started, ordered by what should happen next.

A backlog is re-ordered as priorities change; nothing on it is committed to a particular period until it is pulled into one.

See also: Sprint, Velocity.

Where you meet it: Scrum.

Baseline is the approved plan a project is measured against, frozen until a change is formally approved.

Actuals are compared to the baseline, not to whatever the plan has since become, so a project's variance means something specific.

See also: Change request, Earned value.

A change request is a formal ask to alter a project's scope, schedule, or cost after it was baselined.

It is decided on, not just noted: an approved change request updates the baseline, and a rejected one leaves it exactly where it was.

See also: Baseline, Sign-off.

Where you meet it: Change Requests.

The critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks through the schedule, and its length sets the shortest possible finish date.

Slip any task on the critical path and the whole project's finish date slips with it; slip a task off it and the finish date can hold. Its tasks usually have zero float, but not always -- a constraint can leave a critical-path task with float above zero.

See also: Float, Work breakdown structure.

Where you meet it: Critical Path Method.

A crosswalk names the PMBOK-6 process or technique an agile practice most closely lines up with.

It never claims the two are the same thing, only that one answers the other's coverage question well enough to read from either side; a practice with no PMBOK-6 equivalent carries none, and says why instead.

Where you meet it: Methods.

DMAIC is short for define, measure, analyze, improve, control, a five-step cycle for driving down defects in a repeatable way.

Each step feeds the next in order, and control is what keeps an improvement from quietly slipping back once attention moves elsewhere.

EAC is short for estimate at completion, the current best guess of what a project will actually cost once it is finished.

Unlike the original budget, it is revised as the project runs, so it reflects performance to date rather than the plan made at the start.

See also: BAC.

Where you meet it: Earned Value Analysis.

Earned value is the budgeted worth of the work actually completed by a given date, used to judge progress.

Compared against planned and actual cost, earned value is what turns "we spent the money" into "we got the work that money was for."

See also: EVM, Baseline.

Where you meet it: Earned Value Analysis.

Enterprise environmental factors are outside conditions, like market rules or company culture, that shape how a project can run.

They are not decided by the project and are not produced by it — a process reads them as a given, the way it reads a calendar.

See also: Organizational process assets.

Where you meet it: Enterprise Environmental Factors.

EV is a running figure for the budgeted worth of the work a project has actually finished by a given date.

It is the number that turns progress into the same units as cost, so the two can be compared directly at any as-of date.

See also: Earned value.

Where you meet it: Earned Value Analysis.

EVM is the practice of tracking cost and schedule performance together using a project's budgeted-versus-completed-work figures.

It is what turns a single earned-value figure into a repeatable reading a project takes at every as-of date, not just once.

See also: Earned value.

Where you meet it: Earned Value Analysis.

Float is how many days a task can slip without delaying the project's finish date.

A task with zero float is on the critical path; a task with days of float can run late and the project still finishes on time.

See also: Critical path.

Where you meet it: Critical Path Method.

A knowledge area is one of the ten subject groupings PMBOK sorts project work into, like cost or risk.

Every PMBOK process sits in exactly one knowledge area and one process group, which is what makes the ITTO grid a grid.

See also: Process group.

Where you meet it: PMBOK.

Lessons learned are the written takeaways from a project, captured so the next project can learn from them.

They are recorded through the project, not only at closeout, and feed forward as the raw material a later project's own planning reads.

See also: Organizational process assets.

Where you meet it: Lessons Learned Register.

A milestone is a single dated point on a schedule that marks a significant moment, with zero duration of its own.

A milestone is hit or missed, never partly done — it is a marker on the schedule, not a task with hours logged against it.

See also: Critical path.

Where you meet it: Milestone List.

Organizational process assets are the templates, policies, and past records an organization has built up from earlier projects.

Unlike enterprise environmental factors, these come from inside the organization itself, and a project both reads and adds to them.

See also: Enterprise environmental factors, Lessons learned.

Where you meet it: Organizational Process Assets.

PDCA is short for plan, do, check, act, a four-step cycle a team repeats to make a small improvement, test it, and keep what works.

Each pass around the cycle is deliberately small, so a bad idea is caught and reversed quickly rather than rolled out project-wide first.

PERT estimates a task's duration from three guesses, best case, worst case, and most likely, averaged into one number.

The weighting favors the most-likely guess, so one wildly optimistic or pessimistic estimate cannot swing the result on its own.

See also: Critical path.

Where you meet it: Three Point Estimating.

PM is the short way of writing project manager, the person running the project day to day.

It is a role, not a title tied to any one industry, and it is who a process usually means when it calls for a decision or a judgment call.

PMIS is short for project management information system, the tools that hold a project's working data and make it usable by the team.

It covers scheduling tools, work-tracking boards, shared documents, and reporting layers together, not any one of them alone.

Where you meet it: Project Management Information System.

A process group is one of the five logical groupings, like planning or closing, every PMBOK process belongs to.

A process group is not a calendar period a project passes through once — several can be active on a project at the same time.

See also: Knowledge area.

Where you meet it: PMBOK.

Procurement is the work of buying goods or services from an outside seller for the project.

It covers the whole path from deciding what to buy through choosing a seller to closing the agreement out.

RAG is a three-colour status label, red, amber, or green, showing how healthy a project or task currently is.

A rollup's RAG is the worst of its children's: one red child makes the whole group read red, never averaged away.

Where you meet it: Scorecard.

A risk register is the running list of identified risks, each with its likelihood, impact, and owner.

It is updated as risks are found, change, or close out, rather than written once at the start of a project and left alone.

Where you meet it: Risk Register.

Sign-off is a named person's recorded decision to approve a piece of work, so approval is never assumed.

A sign-off names who decided and when, so approval is a fact the record holds rather than something everyone simply assumed happened.

See also: Change request.

SLA, short for service level agreement, is a promised response or turnaround time a party commits to meet.

It is a measurable commitment, not a hope — a party either met the promised time or did not.

A sprint is a fixed short period, often two weeks, in which a team commits to finishing a set slice of work.

A sprint's length does not change from one to the next, which is what makes a team's output across several of them comparable.

See also: Velocity, Backlog.

Where you meet it: Scrum.

A stakeholder is any person or group whose interests a project's outcome affects, positively or negatively.

A stakeholder need not be on the project team or even aware of the project — the definition is about who is affected, not who is involved.

Where you meet it: Stakeholder Register.

SWOT is short for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, a four-part layout for comparing a situation's internal and external factors.

Strengths and weaknesses look inward at what is already true; opportunities and threats look outward at what could change.

Velocity is the amount of work a team reliably finishes in one fixed work period, used to plan the next one.

Velocity is measured, not set: a team does not decide its velocity in advance, it is read off however much the team actually finished.

See also: Sprint, Backlog.

WBS is short for a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope a project must deliver -- the structure itself, not a step of building it.

Each level of a WBS is a fuller decomposition of the level above it; the bottom level is small enough to estimate and assign with confidence.

See also: Work breakdown structure.

Where you meet it: Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

A work breakdown structure is a hierarchical breakdown of everything a project must deliver, split into progressively smaller pieces.

It is organized around deliverables, not the calendar or the org chart, so a piece of it names a thing produced rather than a date or a person.

See also: WBS, Critical path.

Where you meet it: Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).