Project Management Basic Key Terms - Part III

Project Management Basic Key Terms - Part III

Functional Manager: The boss of any member of your team. Also known as a functional supervisor; this person typically leads a specific work group, such as Marketing, Software Development, or Engineering. In most matrix organizations, functional managers are responsible for assigning the required resources to your project.

Resource levelling: A scheduling technique that addresses the problem of over – committed resources by adjusting the project schedule when the schedule logic places demands on a resources that exceed their availability.

Risk assessment: The combination of risk identification and risk quantification. The primary output of a risk assessment is a list of specific potential problems or threats.

PERT: An acronym for Program Evaluation and Review Technique. Many people refer to the network diagrams with lines and bubbles as “PERT charts”, believing that the bubbles are what make that particular network diagram a PERT chart. What distinguishes the PERT approach from other network diagramming techniques is the use of a probabilistic approach. PERT uses statistics to determine activity durations and to calculate the probabilities of specific project outcomes.

Physical progressing: A way of expressing accomplishment in tangible, verifiable terms.
Corrective action: Measures taken to get a project back on track. It typically pertains to action taken to remedy an unfavourable set of circumstances.

Expert power: The ability to gain support through superior knowledge or capability. In other words, people are more willing to do what you ask because they feel you know what you are doing.

Nonverbal communication: Transmitting messages without using words. Nonverbal communication can happen through body position and movement, posture, facial expressions, clothing, behaviour, and other ways. Nonverbal messages have the ability to replace, emphasize, or contradict verbal messages.

As-built data: The documentation and information that explains how the project was carried out, valuable for understanding the project management process for future new projects or when this project needs to be taken up again in the future.

Punch list project management: The process of managing all the little things that crop up at the end of a project that has to be done before declaring the project successfully completed. There are nearly always such times, often not anticipated, so it’s good to be ready and to know how to handle them, whatever they are.

Root cause: This is the fundamental cause of a problem in a process. Usually a problem occurs in a process because something went wrong in the immediately preceding step or steps. However, this is not the root cause. The root cause may have been something that happened much earlier and caused a chain reaction that resulted in the problem you are now addressing. Look for the root cause if you want to eliminate the problem permanently.