4.9. Key Terms
Key Terms
- Active Control: Takes a two-pronged approach: Controlling what you can by making sure you understand what’s important, taking meaningful measurements, and building an effective team focused on project success. Adapting to what you can’t control through early detection and proactive intervention.
- Actual Costs: this refers to the completed work. Is the easiest of the inputs to understand.
- Cause-and-effect Diagrams help discover problems based on variation.
- Change Control: a set of procedures that lets you make changes in an organized way.
- Control Charts: used to define acceptable limits.
- Cost of Quality: is what you get when you add up the cost of all the prevention and inspection activities you are going to do on your project.
- Cost Performance Index (CPI): provides an indicator of the overall cost performance to date and a good idea of how the project work is trending with regard to cost performance.
- Cost Variance (CV): is the first of two basic variances that can be calculated once EV, PV and AC have been determined for an activity or project. CV is simply the Earned Value minus the Actual Costs.
- Cost-benefit analysis: is looking at how much your quality activities will cost versus how much you will gain from doing them.
- Deliverable: This means anything your project delivers. The deliverables for your project include all of the products or services that you and your team are performing for the client, customer, or sponsor, including all the project management documents that you put together.
- Design of Experiments: is the list of all the kinds of tests you are going to run on your product.
- Earned Value: Refers to the cost of work completed on an activity.
- Earned Value Analysis (EVA): is a monitoring and controlling process that compares project progress to the project baseline (original plan). EVA measures the performance of a project in terms of cost and schedule.
- Implementation Phase: when you and your team actually get to do the project work and generate the deliverables.
- Planned Value: Refers to the expected cost that will be spent on the project over its lifetime.
- Project Reports: provide senior management and project teams an opportunity to determine a project’s status.
- Quality is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements.
- Schedule Performance Index (SPI): provides an indicator of the overall schedule performance to date.
- Schedule Variance (SV): is the second of two basic variances that can be calculated once EV, PV, and AC have been determined for an activity or project. SV is simply the Earned Value minus the Planned Value.
- Statistics: the mathematical interpretation of numerical data—are useful when interpreting large numbers of measurements and are used to determine how well the product meets a specification when the same product is made repeatedly.
- Tolerances are often written as the mean value, plus or minus the tolerance. The plus and minus signs are written together, ±.
“10.8. Key Terms” from Essentials of Project Management by Adam Farag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Modifications: changes to earned value, and cost variance. Removed benchmarking. Added change control, implementation phase and project reports.
