Glossary Project Management

All technical terms of the article The History of Project Management in alphabetical order. The number at the end names the section in which the term is introduced.

A

• Agile – Name for any approach that delivers in short periods, learns from what is delivered and adapts the plan to what is learned; after the Manifesto for Agile Software Development of 2001. 6
• AI agent – Program of language model and tools that in a project creates, assigns and tracks tasks, reports risks and generates reports; in Jira since 2025, as Copilot in Microsoft’s tools; takes from the project manager what can be written down, not the judgement. 8
• All-up testing – Mueller’s decision of 1963 to test the Saturn V on its first flight with all stages at once instead of stage by stage; saved Apollo the time the decade required. 4

B

• Backlog – List of all wishes for the product ordered by value, from which the team picks the top part for the next sprint; reordered after every sprint. 6
• Bar chart – Diagram with the tasks as rows and time as the axis, each task a bar from start to finish, often with a second bar for what has been done; Henry Gantt 1910 to 1917, named by Wallace Clark in 1922; shows when something happens, not what it depends on. 2

C

• Concurrency – Simultaneous development of parts that really ought to arise one after another, to save time; principle of the American missile programmes from 1954 (Atlas), with a precursor in the Manhattan Project. 3
• Configuration management – Rule that every change to a component is applied for, checked, approved and carried through all documents, so that it is known at any time what has been built; from the Air Force’s missile programmes, made the rule at Apollo. 4
• Critical chain method – Goldratt’s transfer of the theory of constraints to projects (1997): the buffers are taken out of the individual tasks and placed as one common buffer at the end of the project. 5
• Critical path – Chain of tasks without float whose sum is the project duration; if a task on the critical path is delayed, the project is delayed. 3
• Critical Path Method – CPM, method of Kelley and Walker (DuPont, Remington Rand, 1957) that forms a network from tasks, durations and dependencies and calculates for each task the earliest and latest start. 3

D

• DevOps – Cooperation of development and operations with shared responsibility and automated delivery; after the talk by Allspaw and Hammond (Flickr, 2009) and the DevOpsDays in Ghent (2009). 6

E

• Earned value – Value of the work actually finished at the planned price; with planned value and actual cost it yields schedule and cost indices and a projection of final cost; mandatory for Pentagon contractors since 1967. 4

F

• Fast-tracking – Starting execution before planning is complete in order to gain time; succeeded at the Empire State Building in 1931 and failed in Sydney, Berlin and Hamburg. 2
• Float – Time by which a task may shift without shifting the end date; tasks on the critical path have none. 3

H

• Hybrid project management – Combination of classical phases, milestones and budgets with agile work within the phases; the most common approach in companies since the 2010s. 7

I

• Iron triangle – Time, cost and scope as the three quantities that constrain every project at once: whoever moves one corner moves the others; after Barnes (1969). 5

K

• Kanban – Control of work through a board with columns for the steps, cards for the tasks and an upper limit of simultaneous tasks per column; from Toyota’s production, for knowledge work by Anderson (2004, book 2010). 6

L

• Lean – Doctrine from Toyota’s production system of avoiding waste and aligning the flow of work with demand; in the West since Womack and Jones (1990), basis of Kanban and DevOps. 6

M

• Matrix organisation – Organisation in which every employee belongs at the same time to a specialist department and to a project; the project manager is responsible for the result, the department head for the people; from the aerospace industry of the 1960s. 4
• Milestone – Event of special significance in the course of a project, usually the end of a phase, at which it is checked whether the plan still holds; term of DIN 69901 (1980). 5

N

• Network plan – Representation of a project as a network of tasks and their dependencies, from which critical path and float can be calculated; CPM and PERT (1957/58), in France the Méthode des potentiels Métra (Roy, 1958), in Germany standardised in DIN 69900 (1979). 3

P

• Planning fallacy – Tendency to underestimate the duration and cost of an undertaking because one imagines its course without surprises; Kahneman and Tversky (1979), shown by Flyvbjerg to be the main cause of overruns in large projects. 7
• PMBOK Guide – A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, textbook of the Project Management Institute, first edition 1996 with nine knowledge areas and 37 processes, seventh edition 2021 with twelve principles, eighth edition 2025 with six; basis of ISO 21500 and ISO 21502. 5
• PMP – Project Management Professional, the PMI’s certificate since 1984, which requires experience and an examination on the PMBOK Guide; over a million holders. 5
• Program Evaluation and Review Technique – PERT, the US Navy’s network planning method for Polaris (1958) with three estimates per task, optimistic, likely, pessimistic, from which an expected duration and the probability of a date follow. 3
• Project – Undertaking with a unique goal, a beginning and an end, as distinct from operations, which repeat the same thing; the word comes from the Latin proiectum, the design, and in the seventeenth century was a term of abuse for the schemes of projectors. 1
• Project management – Planning, steering and accountability for an undertaking with a unique goal, a set deadline and a limited budget; a profession since the armaments and space programmes of the 1950s and 1960s, a doctrine since the standards of the 1980s. Introduction
• Project manager – Person who plans, steers and is accountable for a project across the boundaries of departments, for result, date and cost, usually without the participants reporting to them; described by Gaddis (1959). 3
• Project software – Programs that manage tasks, dependencies, dates, resources and costs and generate plans and reports; Microsoft Project (1984), later Jira (2002) and Trello (2011). 5

R

• Reference class forecasting – Estimating an undertaking from the outcomes of a class of similar, completed projects instead of from one’s own plan; Flyvbjerg and Kahneman, prescribed by the British Treasury in 2004. 7

S

• Scrum – Framework of roles, events and artefacts in which a self-organising team completes a usable piece of product in each sprint and then reorders the plan; Sutherland and Schwaber, 1993 to 1995, after an essay by Takeuchi and Nonaka (1986). 6
• Spiral model – Boehm’s approach (1986) that has a project run through the same steps in ever larger rounds and tackles the greatest risk first in each round; the first recognised model of software in loops instead of phases. 5
• Sprint – Fixed period of usually two to four weeks in Scrum in which the team completes a shippable increment, with planning at the start, review and retrospective at the end. 6
• Stage-gate process – Product development in stages with gates between them at which it is decided whether the undertaking continues, is reworked or ended; Cooper (1990). 5
• Steering committee – Body of client, users and suppliers that stands above the project manager and releases the phases; core of PRINCE (1989) and PRINCE2 (1996). 5

W

• Waterfall model – Development in fixed, successive phases, requirements, design, coding, testing, operation, with complete documentation at each transition; after a picture by Royce (1970), who warned against it. 4
• Work breakdown structure – Decomposition of an undertaking like a tree into parts, sub-parts and work packages, so that each leaf can be assigned to one person to be responsible for, estimate and account for; official since the PERT/COST guide of the Department of Defense and NASA (1962). 3