Course 2 Glossary - Project Initiation

Google Project Management Certificate · Course 2: Project Initiation - Starting a Successful Project

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This is the whole vocabulary of Course 2 as study notes for revision, so I can scan it in a few minutes before a quiz. Every definition is one or two sentences, grouped alphabetically, with a pointer wherever two terms are easy to mix up.

Tip

Read down the letters once for coverage, then go back, cover the right-hand column, and try to define each bolded term from memory. The parentheses flag the pairs that quizzes love to contrast, so give those a second pass.

A

Term	What it means
Adoption	A success metric for how readily customers take up a product or service and fit it into their routine without friction. (Adoption is take-up; engagement is what happens afterwards.)
Asana	A work management platform for planning projects, assigning tasks, automating routine steps, tracking progress, and keeping stakeholders in the loop from one place.

B

Term	What it means
Benchmark	A reference point, usually past performance or industry data, used to judge whether a target is realistic.
Benefits	The gains a project is expected to produce, whether countable (revenue, time saved) or not (morale, brand perception).
Budget	The estimated amount of money the project will need to reach completion; one of the three resource buckets alongside people and materials.
Business case	The justification for running the project at all: the problem or opportunity behind it and the value it is expected to return.

C

Term	What it means
Collaboration tools	Lightweight tools such as email and chat, used for quick check-ins, questions, and everyday conversation about the work.
Conditional formatting	A spreadsheet feature that colours cells automatically based on their contents, for example red for not started and green for complete.
Cost-benefit analysis	Adding up the value a project is expected to create and setting it against what the project will cost in money, so leaders can confirm the gains beat the spend.
Customers	The people or organisation that receives value from the landed project, and usually the ones paying for it. (The customer buys; the user is whoever actually uses the result.)

D

Term	What it means
Data validation	A spreadsheet feature that puts dropdown lists into cells so everyone picks the same wording instead of inventing their own.
Deliverable	A concrete output produced or handed over at the end of a task, event, or process. (The goal is the outcome you want; a deliverable is one of the things you produce to get there.)
Docs	A digital word processing application, the usual home for charters, agendas, plans, and meeting notes.

E

Term	What it means
Engagement	A success metric for how often and how meaningfully customers keep interacting with the product over time. (Contrast with adoption, which only measures whether they started.)

F

Term	What it means
Function	A spreadsheet feature that builds formulas for you, so data can be calculated and summarised automatically: sums, averages, dates, percent complete.

G

Term	What it means
Gantt chart	A horizontal bar chart that lays tasks out across a timeline, making it obvious who owns each piece of work and when it is due.

H

Term	What it means
Header	The top cell or cells of a spreadsheet column, labelling what that column holds.

I

Term	What it means
Influence	How much power a stakeholder holds and how strongly their actions can move the project’s outcome; the vertical axis of the power grid. (Interest is the horizontal axis, and the two are constantly confused.)
Initiation	The first phase of the project life cycle, ahead of planning, executing, and closing, where goals, scope, deliverables, success criteria, stakeholders, and resources all get defined.
In-scope	Work that sits inside the agreed boundaries and moves the project toward its goal. (The mirror of out-of-scope.)
Intangible benefits	Gains that resist being put into numbers, such as employee morale, customer satisfaction, or stronger brand recognition.
Intangible costs	Losses that resist being put into numbers, such as damaged morale or reputational harm. (Same idea as intangible benefits, on the other side of the ledger.)
Interest	How much a stakeholder’s own needs are affected by the project’s operations and outcomes; the horizontal axis of the power grid. (Interest is about being affected, influence is about holding power.)

K

Term	What it means
Key results	The measurable, time-bound outcomes in an OKR that prove the objective has been met, usually two or three and deliberately ambitious. (In practice a key result is a SMART goal sitting under an objective.)
Key stakeholders	The people carrying both high influence and high interest, also called key players; they occupy the manage-closely corner of the power grid.

L

Term	What it means
Land	To measure whether the project genuinely achieved what it set out to, judged against the success criteria agreed at the outset. (Launching is handover; landing is the proof it worked.)
Launch	Delivering the finished result of the project to the client or user. (Stopping here is the classic launch-and-forget mistake.)

M

Term	What it means
Materials	The items the work depends on, both physical (hardware, supplies) and not (software licences, training).
Metrics	The numbers or figures you measure with, chosen so they reflect the goal honestly rather than just being easy to count.

O

Term	What it means
Objective	The half of an OKR that states what is to be achieved, written to be aspirational and motivating. (The objective inspires; the key results measure.)
Objectives and key results (OKRs)	A goal-setting method that pairs one aspirational objective with a few measurable key results. (Against SMART goals: OKRs add a strategic objective, use several metrics, run on a quarterly cadence, and are meant to stretch rather than be comfortably attainable.)
Out-of-scope	Work that falls outside the agreed boundaries and does not serve the goal; letting it in adds time, cost, and risk.

P

Term	What it means
Pivot table	A spreadsheet analysis tool that condenses a large table and exposes the relationships between data points, so patterns become readable.
Power grid	The two-by-two stakeholder analysis grid plotting influence against interest, producing four strategies: manage closely, meet their needs, show consideration, monitor.
Primary stakeholders	People affected directly by the project and who benefit directly from its success, typically the sponsor, the customer, team members, and senior leaders. (Secondary stakeholders are only touched indirectly.)
Productivity tools	Everyday software for producing the artefacts of a project: word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps.
Project charter	The document that pins down all the key details of the project and, once the sponsor and stakeholders approve it, grants the authority to move into planning. (The proposal persuades people to start; the charter defines what was agreed and stays a living reference throughout.)
Project goal	The outcome the project is meant to deliver, meaning what you have been asked to achieve. (The goal is the destination; the deliverables are what you produce on the way there.)
Project manager	The person who plans, organises, and oversees the whole project, and who is accountable for how the team and the work perform.
Project proposal	The document written at the very start of initiation to persuade the organisation that the project is worth doing. (Comes before the charter, is usually authored by a senior leader, and is used only at that early stage.)
Project sponsor	The person accountable for the project who ensures it delivers the business benefits everyone agreed on; they fund it, release resources, and sign the charter.

R

Term	What it means
RACI chart	A grid setting each task against each role to show who is Responsible for doing the work, Accountable for the outcome and its approval, Consulted for input, and Informed of the result. (Responsible does it; Accountable owns and approves it, and there is only ever one per task; Consulted gives two-way feedback; Informed simply receives the news.)
Resources	Everything a project runs on: the budget, the people, the materials, and anything else at your disposal.
Return on investment (ROI)	A metric that expresses the gain from a project relative to what it cost, so competing options can be compared on the same footing.

S

Term	What it means
Scheduling and work management software	Tools for assigning tasks across several teammates and for tracking and visualising progress; they earn their keep on bigger projects with many tasks and a large team.
Scope	The agreed boundary of the project: what is included and, just as importantly, what is not.
Scope creep	Uncontrolled change or growth in scope at any point after the project has begun, arriving from outside (the customer or the market) or from inside (the team adding unrequested polish).
Scope management	Agreeing in advance how proposed changes will be evaluated, accepted or refused, and then carried out. (Scope is the boundary, creep is the boundary slipping, and management is the process that governs both.)
Secondary stakeholders	People touched only indirectly by the project’s success, such as contractors, partner organisations, investors, or a legal contact. (Primary stakeholders are affected directly.)
Silo	A situation where the knowledge and the responsibility for a task rest on one person alone, turning them into a single point of failure.
Slides	Google’s digital presentation application, the usual home for stakeholder updates and project decks.
SMART goals	A checklist for testing whether a goal is well defined: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound. (Unlike an OKR, a SMART goal is one self-contained statement with a single metric, and it is supposed to be attainable rather than a stretch.)
Spreadsheet	A tool for organising, transforming, visualising, and manipulating information; the project manager’s workhorse for timelines, budgets, trackers, and charts.
Stakeholder analysis	Mapping out every stakeholder visually, rating each one’s interest and influence, and deciding how to involve them; also called stakeholder mapping.
Stakeholder buy-in	Drawing stakeholders into the decision-making so there is broad agreement and support, which is what keeps a project from being deprioritised or starved of resources.
Stakeholders	Anyone invested in the project, interested in it, or affected by how it turns out.
Stakes	The parts of a business, situation, or project that stand to be lost if things go wrong; holding a stake is precisely what makes someone a stakeholder.
Steering committee	The most senior decision-making body on a project, with the authority to change the budget and approve updates to timeline or scope; the project manager briefs it but does not sit on it.
Success criteria	The specific, measurable standards used to judge how well the project reached its goals, agreed and documented before the work starts.

T

Term	What it means
Team members	The people who actually build the deliverables, as opposed to those who fund, approve or receive them. They rank as primary stakeholders.
Tools	Software and instruments a team leans on to keep work visible and coordinated, from task boards and schedules to budget sheets and shared documents.
Triple constraint	The three heaviest restrictions on any project: scope, time, and cost. Move one and at least one of the others has to give, with quality suffering when they fall out of balance.

Where these come up

• Initiation 1 - Key components of initiation - initiation, the six components, business case, cost-benefit analysis, ROI, and tangible versus intangible benefits and costs.
• Initiation 2 - Goals, scope and success criteria - project goal, deliverable, SMART goals, OKRs, objective, key results, benchmark, metrics, scope, in-scope, out-of-scope, scope creep, triple constraint, launch and land, success criteria, adoption, engagement.
• Initiation 3 - Working effectively with stakeholders - stakeholders, stakes, primary and secondary stakeholders, key stakeholders, influence, interest, stakeholder analysis, power grid, buy-in, steering committee, RACI chart, silo, sponsor, customers, team members, project manager.
• Initiation 4 - Resources, the charter and tools - resources, budget, materials, project proposal, project charter, tools, productivity tools, collaboration tools, scheduling and work management software, Asana, Docs, Slides, spreadsheet, header, function, conditional formatting, data validation, pivot table, Gantt chart.