Leadership in Project Management

A work breakdown structure decomposes a project's total scope into a hierarchy of deliverables and, at the bottom, work packages small enough to estimate, assign and track, so that everything to be produced appears exactly once.

The critical path is the longest chain of dependent activities through a project's schedule, which sets the earliest possible finish date and on which any delay delays the whole project.

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 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.

A statement of work is the document that commits one bounded piece of work to paper: what gets built, on which assumptions, to what deadline, for what money, and what sits outside 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.