Are you usually caught out when your team is discussing project management? Do you sometimes not quite understand some of the terms or maybe you could use a few new words while your explaining.
The whole point is, before doing proper project management, you should be aware of a few important MUST KNOW terms, so you can be confident and speak your mind clearly.
Here it is the top 10 terms you should know about project management. Go ahead bookmark this for later reference, share with your team, friends, etc. But first...
What is Project Management?
Project management in layman's terms is: Using specific skills, techniques, and tools to achieve a desirable goal. Such as completing a project, delivering a product, etc.
A project needs to be properly executed, but most importantly - properly planned, organized, managed, and tracked for the best results. If you're a project manager, it's your job to plan individual tasks and their timelines. And also the resources needed for them.
Let's get to the terms now.
1. Scope
A project’s scope is what needs to be completed and the work that must be done to deliver a project. You must create a proper scope statement for your project. It is a simple way to prevent scope creep so your team doesn’t get sidetracked by unplanned change or feature requests, which let's be honest - usually ends up happening with most startups.
2. Resource management
Resource management is the process of pre-planning, scheduling, and creating a forecast or staffing plan to ensure that teams are assigned to work and productive, not overbooked. These resources may include: production resources, human skills and engineers, financial resources, and so on.
3. Requirements
Requirement is a task or a group of tasks/conditions that must be completed to ensure that the project is successfully completed. Make sure the project requirements are clearly mentioned in some shared document so that your team can access it anytime to make sure they are on the right track.
Some examples of requirements are: product features, behaviours and services.
4. Milestone
A milestone is a specific event in a project's life cycle, that marks a significant point or change on a project. Milestones help you monitor progress, important deadlines, dates, and deliverables so you can ensure your project always stays on track.
These mark the happy times during project development to assess progress.
5. Risk
Risk is an uncertain event in project's life cycle that, if it occurs, has an effect on at least one of the project's objectives. You must have a risk assessment on hand so you can anticipate and address risk before it does much damage to your flow.
6. Expectation Management
Expectation management is making sure that everyone on the project including the team and stakeholders, are aware of how the project will function, and how you will communicate, and how things will progress and be finished.
7. Agile
Agile is a process of working quickly that is designed to adapt to rapid changes. In startup environments, teams are often small and work in short sprints without lengthy processes or blockers to slow them down.
8. Blocker
Blockers are the unfortunate items or events that tend to slow down progress, and should be anticipated and removed ahead of time. Blockers can range from issues in your tech stack to budget constraints.
9. Backlog
A backlog is a full-fledged list of all the tasks that make up a project's scope. Tasks, in a backlog, are organized and done in priority order to make sure the deadlines are met and all the progress gets streamlined in a smooth flow which allows the deliverables to be met as well as happy customer experiences.
10. Project Plan
A project plan is a document created before a project is executed that includes all the processes, scope, tasks, timeline. And acts as a guideline throughout the progression.
Bonus: Scope Creep
Scope creep happens when the scope of a project expands uncontrollably and begins to take time and resources from other allocated tasks and processes. A proper scope statement is required to prevent such scenarios.
Conclusion
Here we covered some of the must-know project management terms and definitions, now you should be able to understand & manage your projects better.
If you feel like I missed any important terms please let me know down in the comments below. Would love to discuss that.
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