Originally published in 1906, The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce offered cynical definitions of terms of the “political” language of the period. As one of the goals of a PMO is to ensure consistent processes and terminology, this posting attempts to provide similar “helpful” definitions of project management-related terms.
| 360o Communication | Communicating upwards, downwards, diagonally and horizontally within an organisation, and ending up talking to yourself – but probably not through the original orifice. |
| Activity schedule | A well-determined project timetable during which nothing you expected will probably occur. |
| Agile Project Management | The “so far so good” approach to travelling in that you know exactly where you are going but have no idea where you will end up. It is based on adding only a few straws at a time to a camel’s back in the belief that it will not notice the increasing load. The belief that sunk costs will serve to justify on-going investment.Similar to the Rolling Wave approach but with smaller steps and greater hype. |
| Benchmarking | A means of comparison with other companies, designed either to comfort your company in its mediocrity or to lord it over your colleagues for theirs |
| Body of knowledge | The basis on which many standards are based. The challenge is to know when a body part is from a valuable discovery, from a sacred cow, or from a plague-pit. |
| Checklist | A method of reviewing using ticks. A tick is a bloodsucking mite that can act as vector of disease. This is why you should be very careful to check on the originator of the list (whence its name, of course). |
| Consensus | The process of gaining agreement by lowering everyone’s expectations until they match the average level of knowledge of the participants. Since this process discourages the participation of experts and encourages the masses, the average tends to reduce over time, with a predictable feedback effect. This is a favourite approach for politicians to ensure re-election but should be avoided in situations where the result is important such as medicine, wine-making and cookery. |
| Continuous Improvement | Policy of perpetually moving the goalposts in order to improve the rate of scoring. |
| Cost Performance Index | A number inversely proportional to the size of begging bowl required by the project manager. See also “Schedule Performance Index” |
| Critical chain project management | A technique based on sound scheduling principles but which insists on incorporating the Theory of Constraints (q.v.) in order to differentiate itself from other techniques. |
| Critical Path | The place on which to focus management attention while the project team sorts out the real problems. |
| Customer support | Rather like a surgical support, in that it more or less allows you to carry on but without addressing the underlying problem. |
| Earned Value | An objective set of numbers that measure any divergence from plan. Disliked by senior management because not subject to political pressure. |
| Empowerment | Giving staff enough authority to get into trouble by themselves but not enough to get out of it. |
| Estimating | There are 3 approaches to developing any estimate:1) The stakeholder approach: provide the number most likely to be acceptable to key stakeholders in order to get your proposal accepted2) The consensus approach: ask three people; add up their estimates. Provide this number (note the “traditional” averaging approach of dividing by three has been omitted!).
3) The pseudo-scientific approach. Ask an expert for an initial estimate. Multiply it by pi. |
| Forecast end-date | Similar to a mirage or the horizon: this is always kept in sight, but retreats as you approach it. |
| Forecasting | A project activity similar to the ancient science of augury in which the future is predicted by extracting the entrails of animals and examining them. For projects, the forecast is based on analysing the unappetising remains recent activities or the (no more appetising) intestines of senior management (as in “I have a gut feeling about this …”). |
| Free Float | The time it takes the team on a successor activity to realise that the people they are depending on will not have finished on time. |
| Help-line | Phone-based alternative to good products or good service. |
| Integration | As applied in mergers and acquisitions, it can represent any of the following “-ations”:a) optimisation: the best of both firms is preserved. Note: this is always the justification and never the result.b) homogenisation: the cream of both companies is diluted with the less palatable components of the organization
c) desecration: removal of a competitor d) cannibalisation: the less equal company is devoured and excreted other -ations such as decimation, etc. are left as an exercise to the reader. |
| Issue | An excuse for failing to meet project objectives. |
| Issue management | A buck-passing exercise. |
| Lessons Learned | A set of “smart-after-the-event” statements that will be overlooked in similar situations in future. The act of transforming information hidden in the minds of project participants into records hidden somewhere in a database. A form of electronic coprolites |
| Lexicon | A technical dictionary. A list of definitions that are comprehensible only to people who already understand the concepts. |
| Life cycle | An approach that provides the project steering committee with a justification for their existence. A sequence of steps (or “phases”) that inexorably lead the project team towards the Promised Land – but can condemn them to wandering in the wilderness beforehand. A sequence of phases that leads from eggs to caterpillars, pupa and then the emergence of … a moth, frequently, instead of a butterfly. |
| Maturity | Ability to accept the failings that come with age. One example is CMMI (an abbreviation for Consistently Mediocre Management – Institutionalised); (see also project management maturity). |
| Merger | A meeting of equals, in which one is always much more equal than the other. The goal is integration (q.v.). |
| Milestone | A point in a project where everyone can congratulate themselves while secretly redefining the forthcoming goals. |
| Milestone Schedule | The shortest distance between project crises. |
| Motivation | A psychological technique used by management to get unpaid work from the employees. |
| Offshoring | The downside of outsourcing (q.v.) with the added complication of conflicting time-zones. |
| Outsourcing | Transferring key capabilities to people who have less interest in your long-term reputation than in their short-term profits. |
| PERT Diagram | A graphical representation of the predicted course of a project. An acronym for Place Events Randomly Together. The original PERT diagram was an “activity on arrow” representation, which raises the question of who in the project is William Tell, who is his son, and the role of the apple. |
| Post Project Review | Sometimes called “project post mortem”, it is more reminiscent of a forensic exhumation in which the remains of the corpse provide little information as to its earlier existence and even less for how the living should behave. |
| Process groups | Formal assemblages of processes based on characteristics of use to the assemblers rather than to the users of the concept. Its greatest benefit is as a basis for identifying people who do not understand project management as they think that the process groups constitute a project life cycle. |
| Programme Management | A mechanism for encouraging management to accept the responsibility for the way in which it undermines projects. |
| Programme transition plan | What to do at the end of a project or programme. Similar to the evacuation drill on a cruise ship. The major difference is that most cruise ships do have an adequate supply of lifeboats. |
| Project | A temporary disruption to the smooth running of the organisation. |
| Project activity | This is defined as the smallest element of planning. As such it is the project equivalent of a quantum in physics – it is impossible to know all of its characteristics accurately (the indeterminacy principle) and has no actual physical reality until it is measured. |
| Project Budget | Maximum amount that management can admit to expecting to spend on a project. Minimum amount that a project manager can justify to the team as an initial estimate of what the project will cost. A number adapted to provide the required result from a business case calculation. |
| Project charter | A document similar to the vows of marriage that is happily signed by all parties before the hard reality of life has been fully understood. |
| Project Closure | Last point at which to adapt the client’s expectations in line with what is likely to be delivered.Project Closure is often a time of celebration – at least to celebrate that the ongoing cash outflow will probably begin to be reduced. |
| Project Configuration Management | A means of ensuring that all random project changes and errors will seem to have been deliberate once the project is complete. |
| Project kick-off (or “launch”) | Similar to spacecraft launch – an event at which top management sends their team into the unknown with no visible means of support. |
| Project Management | “To project” is to bulge or distend, to throw or to foretell; project management is the art of deciding which of these verbs applies in your case. |
| Project Management Maturity | A) A concept that allows management to justify the changes they wanted to make anyway, based on a set of concepts that they do not understand.B) A set of ideas developed by project managers in the hope that they will be able to impose their model of effectiveness on senior management in order to make their own jobs more bearableC) A state between imbecilic infancy and demented senility. Some organisations pass from the initial state to the final one without even pausing at the central one. |
| Project Plan | A management fiction. A basis for uncontrolled investment. A pious set of statements as to how the project should be run and will progress, frequently based on the assumption that all improbable opportunities will necessarily occur and that no threats, however likely, could ever come to pass. |
| Project Portfolio Management | A means of keeping all of the project staff busy. Allocating all of the project eggs to a set of baskets that are then all carried by a single person. |
| Project sponsor | What used to be called “the patron”, defined in Dr Samuel Johnson’s dictionary as “one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery” |
| Project sponsorship | Act of giving a minimum of money and support to an idea with which the sponsor wishes to be associated if it succeeds, but in which he does not really want to be involved. |
| Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) | A table indicating who-does-what in the project. Incorrectly called a “matrix” rather than a “table” because the resulting acronym would prejudge (probably correctly) the character of the participants. |
| Risk management | A process disliked by executives because it shines the cold light of day on their dreams and promises. |
| Risk management plan | A compendium of hopes and fears. In most projects, it is used as a doorstop. |
| Schedule Performance Index | The reciprocal of this provides a measure of the importance of finding valid reasons for extending the schedule or reducing other stakeholder expectations. |
| Stakeholder register | Rogues’ gallery. |
| Status report | A document in which the reporter provides management with information to encourage them to come to the decisions that the person reporting hopes for. The link between this information and reality is inversely proportional to the gap between the actual status and the plan. |
| Sunk costs | Amount of money or effort that can never be recovered and therefore should not be taken into account when reviewing the budget. Known as “investment” by the proponents of the project and “waste” by its opponents. |
| Theory of constraints | An overhyped approach for justifying favoured solutions with pseudo-scientific techniques. |
| Threat | An uncertain occurrence that can cause disruption. There are of two varieties of threat:- misfortune to your project- good fortune to a colleague’s. |
| Total Float | A duration approximately equal to the delay that the delivery team will allow themselves before starting a task. |