SpeakEasy - Taking the Jargon Our of the Industry SpeakEasy - Taking the Jargon Our of the Industry

Project Management Glossary

Project Management

Scope creep

It sounds terrifying and for project managers it really is: scope creep is when your project starts to exceed its initial scope — often due to factors outside of your control. Sometimes you realize more work is needed than you initially thought. Other times you may run into unforeseen issues. But often, it’s just stakeholders […]

Project Management

Scrum

This can mean one of two things. Firstly, scrum can mean an approach to Agile project management where teams work iteratively in short sprints to make incremental changes or produce deliverables. Alternatively, scrum can also refer to a daily meeting of your team, where every person shares their tasks for the day and any roadblocks […]

Project Management

SMART goals

SMART goals are goals that follow specific characteristics according to the SMART acronym: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Project Management

Sprint

A sprint is the allotted time in which a task or project has to be completed. Sprints are used within the scrum project management methodology, and usually last a few weeks.

Project Management

Sprint planning

A sprint planning meeting is when a team examines a product backlog to figure out the main goals for their next sprint.

Project Management

Stakeholder

The person or group of people who are affected by the outcome or achievements of a project. You can have internal stakeholders (colleagues who initiated the project or who are affected by its outcome) and external stakeholders (typically clients).

Project Management

Statement of work

Also frequently called a SoW, the statement of work is the document that comprehensively details all deliverables expected from a project.

Project Management

Strategic planning

Strategic planning is when you take your organization’s abstract goals and turn them into a concrete strategy. The resulting plan usually includes your organization’s mission, vision, and values.

Project Management

Technical debt

Technical debt encompasses the shortcuts taken when prioritizing speed in software projects. This means projects can launch sooner, but resources will have to be sacrificed down the line to rework these shortcuts and pay down that debt. This concept can be applied to other projects as well; all projects have their shortcuts.

Project Management

Tiger Team

A 1964 paper entitled Program Management in Design and Development used the term tiger teams and defined it as “a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem or simulation”. The paper consists of […]

Project Management

Traffic

The term used for the action of moving work between disciplines to extend work (copy to art or art to production) or moving work from draft to formal reviews for feedback collection – see Route

Project Management

Use case

A situation in which a product may be useful. For instance, a reader needing a quick definition for a specific project management term would be a use case for this blog post.

Project Management

Waterfall methodology

Waterfall is another approach to project management in which a project is completed in distinct step-by-step stages. The next stage cannot be started until the one previous is complete. Gantt charts are one visualization option for waterfall.

Project Management

Work breakdown structure

The work breakdown structure is a hierarchical breakdown of all deliverables required for a project to be considered complete. Project managers often use this methodology to track dependencies between tasks.

Project Management

Work From Home – Hot Take ft. Ed Hudson

One of WAV’s Digital Producers, Ed Hudson, Gives Us a Quick Take on How Working Remotely Compares to Working in His Previous Industry.

Project Management

Workflow audit

A workflow audit is a process through which a project manager finds the weak points of a particular workflow, usually to improve it.

Project Management

Workflow management

Workflow management covers the different approaches a project manager might take to streamline their workflows, make them efficient, and reduce the frequency of common blockers. Unito is a workflow management platform, allowing project managers to integrate their tools for smoother workflows.

Project Management

Workflow process

The workflow process covers the steps involved in building a workflow, mapping it out, and being able to communicate it to other teams.

Project Management

Workflows

Workflows are a map for getting routine work done in the fastest, most efficient, and most satisfying way possible. Even if you don’t use the term, any part of your job that you do repeatedly in a very ordered way is a workflow. Unito is a workflow management platform, meaning we help you organize and […]