Top 10 Terms Project Managers Use

hello i'm jennifer whitt director of projectmanager.com [Music] well welcome to our whiteboard session today on terms that project managers used today I'm going to talk about my top ten and hopefully they'll be helpful I want to point you to a resource that I think it's very helpful this is the guide to project management body of knowledge by PMI the project management institute there are other resources out there you can certainly google some of these terms too but it's important coming into project management whether you're new to project management coming in or maybe you're on and off it's the project manager but there are several terms that project managers use again this is not the end-all be-all these are just some common terms that sometimes get twisted and misused sometimes I want to clarify some of these so the first one is you may hear WBS when I came on board as a project manager I thought what in the world is that a WBS and some people call them the women's I'm like what's a wibbit sort of WBS so it's actually a work breakdown structure so a work breakdown structure is it's hierarchical and it breaks down the work and its deliverables oriented and it really defines the scope of the project so the work breakdown structure keeps breaking different components down to show all the work again that produces deliverables in an essence is the total scope of the project number two is a milestone so you hear different milestones you hear different points on the schedule so this is a significant point in time or event that's on your schedule sometimes you'll see them marked as like a black diamond and again that indicates a milestone on your project sometimes a good best practice for project managers is once you hit a milestone on time that's a great cause for celebration I always use those to celebrate something significant being done number three is a baseline so this to me is where a project can become a failed project or successful project because in the beginning of the project it's important to once the plan is approved by the change Control Board is to baseline it so you're in essence approving the plan the project plan which also includes the project schedule and so what happens is during the project of course chain are always going to occur changes to the time the scope the budget and the quality so as long as you take those changes to a cc B which we'll talk about later to get approved then they're giving you approval to rebase on the project and that's approval to make changes so if your schedule is elongated maybe it's delayed for some time if you get the appropriate approval and REE baseline to me that again is the difference between a failed or successful project so very important the other is a triple constraint so the little twist about a triple constraint is there four components of the triple constraint it's usually indicated by triangle so there it's it's balancing the time the cost the scope and the quality of your project so with the triple constraint as these things occur specifically around changes so the time if you increase the time it might it might and will impact at least one of these other components so it's always managing these things so you keep your project on track and these things are the things that you look at when you take things to the CCB your change Control Board number five is a project lifecycle so there are many different types of project life cycles this is a single phase lifecycle this is the one indicated by PMI the project management institute again it's a single phase and so there are initiating processes that are that occur that feed the planning processes and at the same time so once your project begins executing the executing processes monitoring and controlling processes begin to occur throughout the project and then once the project is completed you hit your closing processes so that is a project lifecycle initiating planning monitoring and controlling executing and closing the project number six is a Gantt chart so a Gantt chart is a tool it's a graphical display of the schedule information so if you look at your work breakdown structure in your in your tool that you use you can look at your work breakdown structure it includes dates and durations for tasks to be completed or deliverables to be produced and then the CCB so when I came on board as a project manager I kept hearing about a CCP I thought what is a CC be certain stands for the change Control Board so the change Control Board is a group of stakeholders so it's not all of the stakeholders its representatives from the stakeholder groups and they are on your board they're the people who are designated in your project plan who are the people with the authority to make approval or denials for things so they review changes they review changes they evaluate them they approve them they delay them or reject changes on your project so these are the people with the authority what I love about this is it takes the pressure off of project managers I see many times where project managers try to take upon themselves to make these decisions and it's not for the project manager to make it's for the project manager to have the processes in place get the chain processes in place for the changes to be fed to the change Control Board and really facilitate that process and again it's that it's the CCB's responsibility for making those decisions and then the stakeholders again so who is a stakeholder so the stakeholders include people or organizations it could be your customers it could be your clients it could be your vendor partners it could be different organizations and they're actively involved so it's important that they're actively involved and they they interact and may be positive or negatively affected by the execution of the project so they have a vested interest so these people who are deemed the stakeholders again they're engaged in something that's being done on the project is usually to assist them with something that they need and they certainly don't want any negative impacts the other one is the change management so many times there is confusion on managing change and change management they say they sound similar but change management is about it's a project management plan so it includes the processes on who does what when and where related to the changes on the projects and this project management plan is to control the scope versus managing change is typically associated with managing change of a project so a project is initiated or executed and it's going to infiltrate different organizations or groups of the corporation and that change is going to have some trigger emotional behaviors of the company so there are many organizations that focus on managing the change and they come in and help the organizations do the communications the planning for the people so that it doesn't cause mass chaos when that project is implemented risk mitigation versus risk management so again like risk management is the plan so risk mitigation is important because it's different than risk identification it's important to identify risk and people on the project sometimes they're really good about identifying risk specifically at the beginning of the project but it's important to identify those all along the way but more importantly is not just identifying the risk but coming up with a mitigation strategy so the risk mitigation is about building a risk response it's a risk response planning technique associated with threats to the project so if these risks that are identified occur you need to know like what happens next so if you just identify them and then those threats do occur on the project then then you're like oh no if you don't have the mitigation strategy and this occurs then it just takes up time it can called a calls a failed project by taking too much time or you're not prepared maybe you need specific resources maybe you need specific equipment or something that is not easy to access so to have that in place to know how to do that but the idea is to reduce the probability of that risk occurring or reducing the impact if it does occur so to me these are some of the top ten to know and know the differences between and help you in your project coming on board as a project manager if you need a tool to help you manage these items effectively on your project so you can begin to use these terms appropriately then sign up for our software now at projectmanager.com

Channel: Project Management Videos

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Keywords: Top, 10, Terms, Project, Managers, Use, project management, project manager, project

Id: 7c8xP1gRIWs

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2012