Software Project Management. Crash-Course.

Stakeholder management is the practice of identifying everyone who affects or is affected by a project, understanding what each wants and can do, and engaging them deliberately so that the project keeps the support it needs and hears the objections while they are cheap.

Change control is the process by which a proposed change to a project's agreed baseline is recorded, assessed for its effect on scope, schedule, cost and risk, and then approved, rejected or deferred by a person holding the authority to do so.

Earned value management measures project performance by comparing the budgeted value of work completed with the value planned to be complete by now and with the cost incurred, producing variances and indices that forecast the final cost and date.

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.

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.