Choosing Your Words

Making sure all stakeholders use the same terminology is crucial in all phases of project management, but it's especially important when you are trying to get a group of diverse people to agree to a schedule. After all, a schedule only works as a form of communication if it is written in a language everyone understands. And since contract terms are often tied to schedule, a lack of common agreement on the meaning of specific terms in a schedule can have far-ranging effects.

Terminology is so important that many state governments around the United States publish their own project management glossaries. As you embark on a new project, you'd be wise to find out if the organization you work for, or the vendors you will be working with, have compiled such a glossary. If such organizational resources exist, use them as a starting point for your own project glossary. Otherwise, you can always turn to the Project Management Institute's lexicon or glossaries provided online by consulting firms or other project management resources such as the following:

  • "Project Management Glossary of Terms"
  • "Free Glossary of Project Management Terms and Definitions"

The following definitions of scheduling-related terms are taken from a variety of sources. You'll find links to these sources in the bibliography at the end of this lesson.

  • milestone: "A significant event in the project; usually completion of a major deliverable". An important distinction is that a milestone is a zero-duration activity; e.g., "acceptance of software by client" is a milestone, preceded by many contributing activities.
  • activity: "An element of work performed during the course of a project. An activity normally has an expected duration, an expected cost, and expected resource requirements". Beware that some organizations subdivide activities into tasks while others use task and activity synonymously.
  • duration: "The amount of time to complete a specific task given other commitments, work, vacations, etc. Usually expressed as workdays or workweeks".
  • resource: "Any personnel, material, or equipment required for the performance of an activity".
  • cost: "An expenditure, usually of money, for the purchase of goods or services".
  • slack: "Calculated time span during which an event has to occur within the logical and imposed constraints of the network, without affecting the total project duration". Or put more simply, slack, which is also called float, is the amount of time that a task can be delayed without causing a delay to subsequent tasks or the project's overall completion date.
A Single Source of Information for Your Project Team

One growing area of project management is virtual project environments. These relatively low-cost, stand-alone environments usually include a built-in project planner, as well as issues databases, resource allocation utilities, task managers, dashboards, and so on. These virtual environments are especially useful for dispersed teams and make access to MS Project or similar software unnecessary. Most importantly, a virtual project environment serves as a single source of information for important documents like project plans, thus avoiding problems with out-of-date or incorrect information circulating among team members. To see some examples, do a web search for Smartsheet, Mavenlink, and Genius Project.