IT & Project Management - Chapter 5

Requirements management plan

A plan that describes how project requirements will be analyzed, documented, and managed.

Bottom-up approach

Creating a WBS by having team members identify as many specific tasks related to the project as possible and then grouping them into higher-level categories.

Top-down approach

Creating a WBS by starting with the largest items of the project and breaking them into subordinate items.

Analogy approach

Creating a WBS by using a similar project's WBS as a starting point.

Prototyping

Developing a working replica of the system or some aspect of it to help define user requirements.

Scope validation

Formal acceptance of the completed project deliverables.

Decomposition

Subdividing project deliverables into smaller pieces.

Scope baseline

The approved project scope statement and its associated WBS and WBS dictionary.

Variance

The difference between planned and actual performance.

Project scope management

The processes involved in defining and controlling what work is or is not included in a project.

Scope creep

The tendency for project scope to keep getting bigger.

Joint Application Design (JAD)

Using highly organized and intensive workshops to bring together project stakeholders—the sponsor, users, business analysts, programmers, and so on—to jointly define and design information systems.

Requirement

A condition or capability that must be met by the project or that must be present in the product, service, or result to satisfy an agreement or other formally imposed specification.

Work breakdown structure (WBS)

A deliverable-oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that defines its total scope.

Project scope statement

A document that includes at least a description of the project, including its overall objectives and justification, detailed descriptions of all project deliverables, and the characteristics and requirements of products and services produced as part of the project.

WBS dictionary

A document that includes detailed information about each WBS item.

Scope

All the work involved in creating the products of the project and the processes used to create them.

Use case modeling

A process for identifying and modeling business events, who initiated them, and how the system should respond to them.

Deliverable

A product or service, such as a technical report, a training session, a piece of hardware, or a segment of software code, produced or provided as part of a project.

Work package

A task at the lowest level of the WBS.

Benchmarking

A technique used to generate ideas for quality improvements by comparing specific project practices or product characteristics to those of other projects or products within or outside the performing organization.