Business Management

Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work by making it visible on a board, limiting how much is in progress at each stage, and improving the flow of items from start to finish rather than working in fixed iterations.

A user story is a short description of a piece of functionality from the perspective of the person who needs it, stating who they are, what they want and why, and carrying acceptance criteria that say when it is done.

The definition of done is the shared, written standard that every piece of work must meet before it counts as complete, covering the quality, testing, documentation and release conditions that make an increment genuinely usable.

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.

A client brief is the short written statement of what a piece of work has to achieve, for whom, and under which fixed constraints, agreed before either side commits to a solution.