Course 1 Glossary - Foundations of Project Management

Google Project Management Certificate · Course 1: Foundations of Project Management

This is the full vocabulary of Course 1 as study notes for revision, so I can look a term up in seconds instead of hunting back through four module pages. Each entry is one or two sentences, and where two terms are easy to mix up I have flagged the contrast in brackets.

A

Term	What it means
Agile	A flexible way of running projects where phases overlap and work is delivered in short repeating cycles, so the team can absorb feedback as it arrives. (Contrast with Waterfall, which closes each phase before opening the next.)
Authority	The formal power to make project decisions that carry weight across the organization. Project managers often hold very little of it, which is why influence matters so much.

B

Term	What it means
Barrier	Anything standing in the way of progress, from a missing approval to an unavailable person. Clearing barriers is a core part of the PM’s job during execution.
Buzzword	A word or phrase that is fashionable in an industry or a moment in time. Worth knowing for the job hunt, since searching the right buzzword surfaces the right postings.

C

Term	What it means
C-Suite	The chief-level executives of a company, such as the CEO, CFO, and COO.
Change agent	Someone inside the organization who drives transformation by pushing it to work more effectively and keep developing.
Change management	The work of getting a finished project actually adopted by the people who have to live with it. (Delivering the thing is not the finish line; adoption is.)
Classic structure	An organization arranged top-down, where everyone reports up a single chain of command. (Also called functional; contrast with matrix.)
Closing	The last phase of the life cycle, where the work is confirmed complete, signed off, reviewed for lessons, handed over, and celebrated.
Contract work	Work done for a company by people who are not its employees, taken on project by project.
Corporate governance	The company-wide framework of rules and oversight through which an organization pursues its goals. (Broader than project governance, which covers a single project.)
Cross-functional team	A team pulled from different departments and skill sets, assembled around one project rather than one function.
Culture mapping	A tool for laying out a company’s values, norms, and everyday behavior, so you can see in advance how a change is likely to land.

D

Term	What it means
Delegation	Handing each task to the person or resource best placed to finish it, instead of absorbing everything yourself.
Deliverable	A concrete outcome or piece of work the project has to produce, for example a trained support team or 500 collected signatures.
DMAIC	Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control: the five-step improvement cycle at the heart of Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma.

E

Term	What it means
Effective communication	Being open and early with plans and information, so nobody on the project has to guess where things stand.
Escalation paths	The agreed routes for raising a risk or problem to the person who can act on it, and doing so while there is still time to act.
Executing	The phase in which the team carries out the planned tasks while the project manager tracks progress, removes blockers, and adapts the plan.

F

Term	What it means
Feedback mechanism	Any instrument used to collect input from stakeholders, a survey being the standard example.
Floating task	A task that could slip its delivery date without harming the timeline or the project’s overall success. (Contrast with work on the critical path, where any slip pushes everything.)
Flowchart	A diagram that maps a process one step at a time, making a project’s development path visible at a glance.
Functional manager	Whoever runs a standing department and controls its staff and budget, so a project manager usually has to borrow people from them rather than command them.
Functional organizations	Companies divided into departments by function, such as finance, marketing, or engineering. Also known as classic organizations.

G

Term	What it means
Governance	The management framework that determines how decisions get made and who is accountable and responsible for what.

I

Term	What it means
Influencing without authority	Getting teammates to deliver their assigned work when you are not their manager, relying on relationships, clarity, and persuasion instead of formal power.
Initiation	The opening phase of a project, where goals, deliverables, budget, resources, and people are identified and approval is secured.
Internship	A short placement that buys hands-on experience in an industry, often the way into a first project role.
Interpersonal skills	The behaviors that make working with other people go well: communicating, negotiating, defusing conflict, and reading what motivates someone. These are what let you influence without authority.
Iterative	Working in a way where phases and tasks overlap or repeat rather than queue up one behind another. (Contrast with linear.)

K

Term	What it means
Kanban	An Agile approach and tool that makes work status visible, using a board or chart where cards move across columns as they progress.

L

Term	What it means
Lean	A methodology built around stripping waste out of an operation so that every remaining step adds value.
Lean Six Sigma	The blend of its two parent methodologies, used when a project has to save money, lift quality, and move through its processes quickly all at once.
Linear	A project structure in which each phase or task must be finished before the next one can begin. (Waterfall is the classic linear method.)

M

Term	What it means
Matrix structure	A grid-shaped hybrid organization where people have a direct manager to report to and also answer to stakeholders from other departments or programs. (Contrast with classic, which has one reporting line only.)
Mission	A statement that pins down what an organization does, who it does it for, and why.

O

Term	What it means
Organizational culture	The shared values, history, and habits that give a company its personality and decide how work really gets done.
Organizational structure	The way a company arranges its people, departments, and reporting lines.
Ownership	The feeling that a person is genuinely empowered to take responsibility for getting their own tasks finished.

P

Term	What it means
Planning	Building and maintaining the schedules, timelines, budgets, and documentation that make a project trackable, using whatever productivity tools and processes fit.
Program manager	A project manager who runs several related projects at once for a given product, team, or program. (At Google this title is common even for people doing ordinary project management.)
Project	A temporary, one-off effort with a defined start and finish that produces a unique set of deliverables. (Contrast with operations, which is ongoing and repeating, and with a program, which bundles related projects together.)
Project governance	The framework that sets how decisions get made inside a single project.
Project life cycle	The shared structure every project runs through: initiate the project, make a plan, execute and complete tasks, then close it.
Project management	Applying knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to the work of a project so that its requirements are met.
Project management methodology	A defined set of guiding principles and processes for carrying a project through its life cycle, such as Waterfall, Scrum, or Lean Six Sigma.
Project management office	An internal group, usually shortened to PMO, that defines and maintains project management standards for the whole organization.
Project manager	The person who shepherds a project from start to finish, guiding the team with organizational and interpersonal skills the whole way.
Project task	A single activity that has to be completed inside a set window by the project manager, the team, or a stakeholder.

R

Term	What it means
Reporting chart	A diagram of the people and groups in an organization showing who reports to whom.
Resource availability	Knowing how to get hold of the people, equipment, and budget a project needs, and when they can be had.
Resources	Everything a project draws on to get finished: people, equipment, software, vendors, budget, and physical space.
Retrospective	A meeting or workshop with the team after a project or phase, held to capture what worked and what to run differently next time.
Risk	An event that might happen and would affect the project if it did. (A risk is still potential; a barrier is already in the way.)

S

Term	What it means
Scrum	An Agile framework in which a small cross-functional team, guided by a Scrum Master, builds complex work collaboratively across short sprints with an agreed list of deliverables.
Six Sigma	A methodology that cuts variation out of the work by making sure the same quality process is followed every single time. (Lean removes waste; Six Sigma removes variation.)
Sprint	A fixed, short stretch of time in Agile, typically one to four weeks, in which the team completes a set list of deliverables.
Stakeholder	Anyone with an interest in the project or affected by whether it succeeds.
Steering committees	A senior group that sets an organization’s priorities and steers the general course of its operations.

T

Term	What it means
Transferable skill	An ability that carries from one job or career path to another, such as organizing, budgeting, or leading a group.

U

Term	What it means
Urgency	Getting the team to feel that the project matters now, and to see which specific actions will move it forward.

V

Term	What it means
Values	The principles that describe how people in an organization are expected to behave.

W

Term	What it means
Waterfall	A methodology in which phases run one after another in a fixed sequence, best suited to work whose requirements are unlikely to change. (Contrast with Agile, which loops and expects change.)

Where these come up

Project, project management, project manager, deliverable, program manager, transferable skill, internship, contract work and buzzword are built up properly in Foundations 1 - Embarking on a Career, including the project vs program vs portfolio ladder.
Delegation, effective communication, escalation paths, influencing without authority, interpersonal skills, cross-functional team, authority, ownership and urgency are the heart of Foundations 2 - Becoming an Effective Project Manager.
Project life cycle, initiation, planning, executing, closing, retrospective, risk, methodology, linear, iterative, Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, sprint, Kanban, Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma and DMAIC are all worked through with examples in Foundations 3 - The Project Life Cycle and Methodologies.
Organizational structure, classic structure, functional organizations, functional manager, matrix structure, reporting chart, PMO, governance, project governance, corporate governance, steering committees, change management, change agent, organizational culture, culture mapping, mission and values belong to Foundations 4 - Organizational Structure and Culture.
The smaller supporting terms - barrier, floating task, flowchart, feedback mechanism, resources, resource availability, project task, stakeholder and C-Suite - are scattered across all four modules, so this page is the easiest place to learn them.