Basecamp 3 Fundamentals

A Gantt chart is a schedule drawn as horizontal bars against a calendar, one bar per activity, with dependencies drawn between them and progress shown along each bar.

A risk register is the project's living list of things that might happen and would matter, each with an estimate of likelihood and impact, a planned response, an owner and a review date.

Stakeholder management is the practice of identifying everyone who affects or is affected by a project, understanding what each wants and can do, and engaging them deliberately so that the project keeps the support it needs and hears the objections while they are cheap.

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.