Please feel free to point to this document. For non-profit purposes you may copy this document, either whole or as whole definitions provided the above copyright notice is attached. On a project you may think you all speak the same language, but that may not be true.
Many familiar terms mean very different things to different people.
Successful project management depends on clear communication and all participants must share a common understanding of the terminology they use if problems are to be avoided. Consequently, project communications can be foggy at best and down right dangerous at worst if people use the same term to convey different meanings. In practice every project ought to have its own reference glossary, but unfortunately this is not always the case. In many cases we provide not just one meaning but several from authoritative sources. This illustrates the variation in even the most common terms.