MSP For Dummies

Appendix B

Glossary of the Main MSP Terms

This appendix contains the terms that are relevant to MSP. I draw the detail from the AXELOS Project and Programme Management (PPM) Common Glossary at www.axelos.com/glossaries-and-acronyms/common-glossary/. Axelos is the name of the new joint-venture set up by the UK government to hold the intellectual property rights for MSP and a number of other change-delivery practices.

The Common Glossary is much more than a simple glossary for MSP or any other change-delivery practice such as PRINCE2. The Common Glossary Reference Group tries to apply consistency to the definitions used across different manuals. But they try not to be too inflexible; if there's a good reason for a manual to use a slightly different definition because of the context in which the term is used, then that's fine.

I've been heavily involved in the Common Glossary since its inception. I drafted the first version and have been on the Common Glossary Reference Group, which continues to approve new entries. Hardly surprising therefore that I think the Common Glossary is pretty useful.

I'm not a fan of adding a lot of additional information to glossary entries. I think that makes the glossary difficult to maintain and more complex than it needs to be. In my view a glossary should just give definitions. So, in the main, I give you the exact definition from the Common Glossary here, with a couple of exceptions. Firstly, my editors have made a couple of very minor tweaks just ...