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10 Most Overused Terms In Project Management

November 15, 2007 from Raven's Brain: Project Management

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Critical Path Plan
 
War Room: Another way to add magnitude and significance to your project is to have a dedicated project war room. This will be a museum to the project itself. On the walls will be important plans and graphics and issues. Someone usually adds a piece of paper near the door that has quotes scribbled on it. Maybe it’s less like a museum and more like clubhouse. It seems that every important (e.g. highly visible) project that I hear of now want its own war room. At this rate, we will have more projects than rooms to dedicate to them. “I am sorry, but your CEO-sponsored project can not begin yet because we are out of war rooms at the moment. I do have a vacancy on the 17th of next month. Shall I put you down for a reservation?”
 
WBS: The term refers to a work breakdown structure. A WBS is a formal (or informal) decomposition of all of the products and services that a project is to deliver (i.e. the work). The way it is often used, however, is to refer to anything in a project schedule. “Does your project have a WBS?” “Yes, and I have set the dates and added all of my resources to it.” A WBS does not have any dimension of time to it, but the corporate world seems to think a WBS is interchangeable with a project schedule.
 
Slack-Time: This properly refers to the amount of time a given task can be delayed before it impacts the critical path. I have heard more variations of this than I can list. I have heard slack time used for tasks that are not value-add tasks, tasks that we can put entry resources on because they are easy (slacker), and that slack time is a chargeable overhead area for project resources that don’t have immediate work to perform.
 
Paper-Pusher PM
 
Resource Load
 
ROI: The equation that determines what value the project will deliver after its completed and how long it will take to recoup what was spent on the project (i.e. payback) This term is routinely used as verbal shorthand for “What does the project cost?” I mistakenly calculated an early ROI for an internal manager on a project when what she really wanted to know was just the price tag.
 
Issue: This one is a personal pet peeve. An issue is a problem with a given piece of work that can’t be resolved by the person who owns that piece of work. It basically means “this is stopping me from doing what I planned to do.” It is happening. This is different from a risk, which is something that has potential to happen. It is also not an action item, which is just a “to-do” that falls out of the natural course of performing work. In many projects that I have been involved with, I have seen problems, risks and action items all lumped into the same dumping ground called “issues.”
 
Deliverable
 
Crash (the Schedule): This one is my personal favorites. It seems that whenever any manager first hears the term, it is cemented in their memory just waiting for the first meeting that they can blurt it out to show off their intelligence. “Crash the schedule” refers to an analysis of how many resources I can add to a given task that is falling behind to bring it back on schedule. I think it is most often interpreted as the default excuse by management to demand longer hours and weekends to not address tasks, but to wrap up the entire project sooner.

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