Project Management, leadership, and communication - Part 1

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 usable.

A retrospective is a regular, structured meeting in which a team examines how it worked over the last period, decides what to change, and commits to one or two concrete improvements for the next one.

Incident management is the service-management practice of restoring a disrupted IT service to normal operation as quickly as possible, through a defined process of logging, categorising, prioritising, resolving and closing each incident, separate from the later work of finding and fixing its root cause.

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.