Project Management: Best Practices From 13 Years Consulting

Scrum is a lightweight framework for delivering complex work in fixed-length iterations called sprints, with three accountabilities, five events and three artefacts, defined in a short public guide.

A sprint is a fixed-length iteration of one month or less in which a team plans a goal, builds a usable increment toward it, shows the result, and reviews how it worked, before the next sprint begins immediately.

A product backlog is the single ordered list of everything that might be done to improve a product, owned by one person who decides the order, refined continuously, and drawn from when each iteration is planned.

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.

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.