Advanced Project Management (1/4): Project Initiation

Change control is the process by which a proposed change to a project's agreed baseline is recorded, assessed for its effect on scope, schedule, cost and risk, and then approved, rejected or deferred by a person holding the authority to do so.

Earned value management measures project performance by comparing the budgeted value of work completed with the value planned to be complete by now and with the cost incurred, producing variances and indices that forecast the final cost and date.

Agile is a family of delivery approaches that build a product in short iterations, each producing something usable, so that plans are corrected by what was learned rather than defended against it.

Scope creep is the quiet expansion of a priced piece of client work through additions that each look too minor to renegotiate, until what gets delivered is substantially larger than what was sold.

A retainer is a recurring fee that holds a supplier's time or availability open across a period, so what the client buys is first call on somebody's attention rather than any named artefact.

A day rate sells a bounded unit of a supplier's working time rather than a finished result, so the client rather than the supplier carries the risk that the job turns out bigger than it looked.