Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we'll pick up where we left off in the previous movie; a review of the component definitions. We covered the activity related components and a milestone, so let's pick up from there beginning with project control account. This term has a behavior of helping to keep better focus when planning and monitoring the schedule. Next let's cover the official definition and remember that these official definitions come from the Practice Standard for Scheduling. And that definition is a management control point where scope, budget, actual cost and schedule are integrated and compared to earned value for performance management. Control accounts are placed at selected management points of the WBS and this is something that we covered very thoroughly when we talked about WBS or the work breakdown structure. Our next term or component for review is the project description and the behavior is meant to describe the project in a brief, short phrase and the official definition: documented narrative summary of the project scope statement. When putting together your project description, typically done by the project manager, it will ideally summarize the scope of the work for the overall project. This is sometimes challenging to do since we're tempted to be detailed but a short description can be just as effective. Remember the saying less is more. Making sure you have a project description in the first place can be a good reminder to senior management what your project is about, particularly when there are many active projects within an organization. Let's go ahead and move on next to project manager. And the behavior here simply shows the name of the project manager and this should be clearly displayed on reports or other project information that's distributed so individuals know who to contact about the project. And the definition: the person assigned by the performing organization to achieve the project objectives. I think this is fairly self-explanatory so we'll continue to move on here. Next, we have another fairly simple one: the project name and the behavior, just like the previous one. Again this is a basic component. It just refers to the project name. But let's look at the official definition now. The official definition is perhaps not as short but it's a short phrase or a label for each project used in conjunction with the project identifier to differentiate a particular project from other projects in a program; sometimes also known as a project title. Again here we're simply identifying the project, not describing it. Moving on, we have project schedule ID and let's look at the behavior. It identifies the project by a unique identifier and this is what I referred to in the previous component's definition as a project identifier. We've already covered various types of coding for the WBS and activity and here we have one identifying the project. These can be assigned automatically depending on how your organization tracks projects. And on to the definition. It says a short, unique numeric or text identification assigned to each schedule model to differentiate that schedule model from others. And again, it's also referred to as the project identifier. The more projects your company manages, the more important these become but think about the value of having project schedule IDs assigned when looking back at historical archives. Next, we have project version. The behavior: as changes are made to the project, that version number should be updated for tracking purposes. This will clarify which project version the schedule represents. The standard version format is easiest to follow. And the definition: a designation of the instance of a schedule, such as a revision number, version codes, as of date and so forth. Perhaps the behavior clarifies what the official definition means. Next, we have a summary activity and the behavior is a rolled-up version of several related activities which can be referred to as subordinate activities. That would mean that this summary activity inherits the information from the subordinate activities and the definition: a group of related schedule activities aggregated at some summary level and displayed and reported as a single activity at that summary level. It's also referred to as a hammock. And our final component; WBS element ID. Let's take a look at the behavior first as usual. We actually covered this one and also looked at how the numbering structure typically works within a WBS. This is that unique identifier that we had reviewed. We saw how it connected the WBS components to the corresponding item within the WBS dictionary for additional information. And the official definition: a short, unique numeric or text identification assigned to each WBS element to differentiate a particular WBS from any other WBS element in a program. Although not an official component, I'd also like to define for you what level of effort is since this is an official scheduling term and it was mentioned earlier within this course. I didn't note it on your screen since it's not an official component. A level of effort is defined by the Practice Standard for Scheduling as a support-type activity like project management that does not produce definitive end products. It's generally characterized by a uniform rate of work performance over a period of time determined by the activity supported. Sometimes these level-of-effort type activities are difficult to quantify and measure something like earned value. And with that said, that wraps up our component definitions for now, bringing this section to a close, meaning that to date we've covered thoroughly the entire first process within scheduling, define activities along with the foundation of a schedule and the related scheduling component terms. And that concludes this movie.