Scope & Requirements
This term describes the uncontrolled expansion of a project's scope without adjustments to time or budget.
What is Scope Creep?
This document logs all identified risks, their likelihood, impact, and mitigation strategies.
What is a Risk Register?
This person is ultimately responsible for approving major project decisions, resolving escalated issues, and championing the project at a senior level.
What is a Project Sponsor?
This visual project management tool displays tasks, durations, and dependencies as horizontal bars across a timeline.
What is a Gantt Chart?
This two-word PM term describes the moment a project gets a green light to officially begin.
What is Project Kickoff?
This document formally defines the project's deliverables, objectives, and boundaries.
What is a Statement of Work (or Scope Statement)?
This risk response strategy involves shifting the impact of a risk to a third party.
What is Risk Transfer?
This document identifies all project stakeholders and outlines how and when they will be communicated with.
What is a Communications Management Plan?
This is the longest sequence of dependent tasks that determines the shortest possible project duration.
What is the Critical Path?
This is the key difference between a project and a program — while a project delivers a specific output, a program delivers this instead.
What is a Strategic Benefit (or Business Outcome)?
In Agile, this lightweight requirements format captures a feature from the end user's perspective, following the structure "As a… I want… So that…"
What is a User Story?
The two factors multiplied together to calculate a risk's overall exposure score.
What are Probability and Impact?
This stakeholder analysis tool maps stakeholders by their level of power versus their level of interest.
What is a Power/Interest Grid?
The amount of time a task can be delayed without impacting the overall project completion date.
What is Slack (or Float) ?
This iterative approach to project delivery embraces change, delivers value incrementally, and prioritizes customer collaboration over rigid planning.
What is Agile?
Whether Agile or Waterfall, this practice ensures scope changes are evaluated for their impact on time, cost, and resources before being accepted.
What is Impact Analysis?
This passive form of risk acceptance takes no proactive action, choosing to deal with a risk only if and when it occurs.
What is Passive Acceptance?
This communication approach tailors the level of detail, frequency, and format of updates based on each stakeholder's role, influence, and interest in the program.
What is a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy?
This scheduling technique uses optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely estimates to calculate expected task duration.
What is PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique)?
This phenomenon occurs when a project or program continues to receive funding and support despite clear signs of failure simply because too much has already been invested to stop.
What is the Sunk Cost Fallacy?
In agile programs, this prioritized list serves as the single source of truth for all planned work, owned by the Product Owner.
What is a Product Backlog?
This metric quantifies the total financial exposure of a program by multiplying the probability of a risk by its potential monetary impact.
What is Expected Monetary Value (EMV)?
This leadership challenge is unique to program managers who must align and communicate with stakeholders over whom they have no direct authority or reporting relationship.
What is Influencing Without Authority?
This method compresses the project schedule by overlapping tasks that would normally be done sequentially.
What is Fast Tracking?
This PM concept describes the progressive detailing of a project plan as more information becomes available throughout the project lifecycle.
What is Rolling Wave Planning?