Project Planning Tools

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 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.