The vocabulary the exams and the daily work both assume you already have. Every entry gives the definition, the source it is drawn from, and the misreadings that follow from getting it wrong.
50 concepts in Project Management, page 2 of 3
Getting people to work differently once the thing is built, which is where most of a project's value actually sits and is a separate discipline from controlling changes to the baseline.
Project Management
Seven performance domains name the areas a project has to perform in, five focus areas name the points in its life where work happens, and forty processes sit at the intersection.
Project Management
Material, equipment and facilities have lead times, storage costs and delivery windows that effort does not, and planning them as though they behaved like people is a reliable way to stall a project.
Project Management
Make or buy as an economic decision, the fixed price, cost reimbursable and time and materials families and who carries the risk under each, the procurement cycle, and why a contract type is a relationship.
Project Management
Final acceptance, contract closure, releasing resources and archiving records, why a cancelled project is closed the same way, and the difference between a deliverable being accepted and a benefit being realised.
Project Management
Deciding who needs what information, when, in what form and how often, and keeping the plan that records it in actual use.
Project Management
How a project moves from an estimate to a cost baseline to a funding requirement, where contingency and management reserve sit relative to each, and what it means to control spend.
Project Management
The framework of decision rights on a project, meaning who decides what, at which thresholds and on what evidence, and why writing it down makes delivery faster.
Project Management
Quality is conformance to requirements and fitness for purpose, bought through prevention ahead of inspection, and measured by a cost of quality model that reaches past handover.
Project Management
Risk is uncertainty with an effect on an objective, and the effect may be positive, so the same identification, analysis and response machinery serves threats and opportunities alike.
Project Management
Establishing what work is in the project and keeping it there, which turns on the difference between product scope and project scope and on whether each change passed through a decision.
Project Management
Finding the people a project affects, understanding where each of them stands, and closing the gap between that and where the project needs them.
Project Management
What counts as an impediment, why most of them are organisational and few are technical, and how a log turns a run of bad days into a visible pattern.
Project Management
A regular inspection of how the work is being done, conducted so that it produces one change with an owner, and never a list of complaints that nobody acts upon.
Project Management
Building a model of how work unfolds in time from activities, dependencies and durations, then reading the critical path, the float and the price of every compression it offers.
Project Management
A way of leading in which the leader clears obstacles and supplies what the team needs to deliver, and leaves the detailed decisions about the work with the people doing it.
Project Management
How a project connects to the organisation's strategy through the portfolio and programme layers above it, and what to do when the strategy moves while the project is still running.
Project Management
The environmental, social and economic obligations a project has to account for, how a constraint differs from an objective, and why they increasingly arrive through the contract.
Project Management
Deciding which practices, artefacts and controls a particular project will use, at what formality, and being able to say why each one earns its place.
Project Management
An ordered list of everything the work might contain, kept in value order, detailed at the top and vague at the bottom, and reordered whenever the situation changes.
Project Management