Chapter 5
Terms
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- crashing
- a technique for making cost and schedule trade-offs to obtain the greatest amount of schedule compression for the least incremental cost.
- critical path
- The series of activities that determine the earliest time by which the project can be completed; it is the longest path through the network diagram and has the lease amount of slack or float.
- Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)
- a network analysis technique used to estimate project duration when there is a high degree of uncertainty about the individual activity duration estimates.
- Theory of Constraints (TOC)
- a management philosophy that states that any complex system at any point in time often has only one aspect or constraint that is limiting its ability to achieve more of its goal.
- baseline
- a starting point, a measurement or an observation that is documentd so that it can be used for future comparison; also defined as the original project plans plus approved changes
- multitasking
- when a resource works on more than one task at a time
- activity on arrow (AOA) or (ADM)
- a network diagramming technique in which activities are represented by arrows and connected at points called nodes to illustrate the sequence of activities.
- work package
- a task at the lowest level of the WBS
- Gantt charts
- a standard format for displaying project schedule information by listing project activities and their corresponding start and finish dates in a calendar format
- Project management plan
- a document which is a deliverable for the project integration management knowledge area, used to coordinate all project planning documents and to help guide a project's execution and control.
- external dependencies
- the dependencies that involve relationships between project and non-project activities.
- discretionary dependencies
- the dependencies that are defined by the project team.
- activity attributes
- information that provides schedule-related information about each activity, such as predecessors, successors, logical relationships, leads and lags resource requirements, constraints, imposed dates, and assumptions related to the activity
- project buffer
- the additional time added before a project's due date to account for unexpected factors
- critical chain scheduling
- A method of scheduling that takes limited resources into account when creating a project schedule and includes buffers to protect the project completion date.
- analogous estimates or top-down estimates
- the estimates that use the actual cost of a previous, similar project as the basis for estimating the cost of the current project
- Parkinson's law
- work expands to fill the time allowed
- effort
- the number of workdays or work hours required to complete a task
- cost baseline
- a time phased budget that project managers use to measure and monitor cost performance.
- Murphy's Law
- if something can go wrong, it will.
- feeding buffers
- Additional time added before tasks on the critical path that are preceded by non-critical path tasks
- Precedence diagramming method (PDM)
- A network diagramming technique in which boxes represent activities
- Three-point estimate
- an estimate that includes an optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic
- slack or float
- the amount of time an actvity may be delayed without delaying a succeeding activity or the project finish date
- buffer
- additional time to complete a task, added to an estimate to account for various factors.
- network diagram
- a schematic display of the logical relationships among, or sequencing of, project activities.
- burst
- an occurrence when two or more activities follow a single node on a network diagram.
- scope baseline
- the approved project scope statement and its associated WBS and WBS dictionary.
- parametric modeling
- a technique that uses project characteristics (parameters) in a mathematical model to estimate project costs.
- milestone
- a significant event on a project
- duration
- the actual amount of time spent working on an activity plus elapsed time
- node
- the starting and ending point of an activity on an activity-on-arrow network diagram
- merge
- a situation when two or more nodes precede a single node on a network diagram
- activity list
- a tabulation of activities to be included on a project schedule
- bottom-up estimates
- Cost estimates created by estimating individual activities and summing them to get a project total.
- Work breakdown structure (WBS) dictionary
- a document that describes detailed information about WBS tasks.
- work breakdown structure (WBS)
- a deliverable-oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that defines the total scope of the project
- fast tracking
- a schedule compression technique where you do activities in parallel that you would normally do in sequence.
- dependency or relationship
- The sequencing of project activities or tasks
- team contract
- a document created to help promote teamwork and clarify team communications