Project & Delivery

Iterative way of working

Building software in small, frequent steps and adjusting as you go, rather than planning everything upfront.

Sequential phases

The traditional approach: analysis, design, build, test, deploy, each phase finished before the next begins. Still appropriate where requirements are fixed and regulated.

A popular Agile framework

Scrum organises work into short, fixed-length cycles called sprints, one month or less and most commonly two weeks, each ending with something usable.

Flow-based delivery

Work moves across a board of columns with a cap on how many items may be in progress at once. Suits continuous streams of work better than fixed sprints.

The prioritised waiting list

Everything identified but not yet done, kept in priority order. Grooming or refinement is the routine of keeping it ordered and well described.

Large item, and its small pieces

An epic is a big chunk of work; user stories are the small deliverable slices within it, written from the user's point of view.

What 'working' means

The specific conditions that must be true before a piece of work counts as complete. The modern descendant of the signed-off requirement.

The team's finish line

The agreed checklist every item must meet before it is called done: tested, reviewed, documented, deployed.

The daily sync

A short daily meeting, often fifteen minutes, where the team says what they did, what they are doing and what is blocking them.

Looking back to improve

A regular team review of how the last cycle went and what to change. Distinct from a post-mortem, which follows a specific incident.

Delivery rate

How much a team completes in a typical sprint, used to forecast. Measured in story points, a relative sizing rather than hours.

What is coming, roughly when

The plan of major work ahead. Modern roadmaps commit to direction and sequence rather than precise dates.

Checkpoints and outputs

A milestone is a significant point in the plan; a deliverable is a tangible output handed over.

Uncontrolled growth

Work quietly expanding beyond what was agreed, without a matching change to time, budget or resource. The classic project killer, then and now.

Something stopping progress

An issue preventing work continuing until it is resolved. Raising blockers early is the main purpose of the daily standup.

Work that must come first

Something your task relies on, whether another team, a supplier or another piece of work. In code the same word means an external library.

Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies

A single register tracking the four things most likely to derail delivery. Common in UK and public-sector project governance.

Anyone with a stake in the outcome

People affected by or interested in the work: users, sponsors, partners, regulators.

A logged unit of work

A tracked item such as a bug, task or feature request, managed in a tool like Jira or GitHub Issues.

Peer check before merging

Team-mates reading each other's code and suggesting fixes before it is merged into the main project.

Quality Assurance

The overall practice of checking that software works as intended, including automated and manual testing.

User Acceptance Testing

The final check by the people who will actually use the system, confirming it does what they need before go-live.

The cost of shortcuts

The future rework created by quick-and-dirty choices made to ship faster in the short term.

Learning from an incident

A structured review after something went wrong. A blameless post-mortem focuses on the system and process rather than individuals, which produces better information.

Finding out before building

An early phase spent understanding the problem, users and constraints before committing to a solution.

Business as Usual

The normal ongoing operation of a service or organisation, distinct from time-limited project or transformation work.

Product Requirements Document

A concise shared document describing a product's purpose, users, required behaviour, features and success criteria.

Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed

A responsibility matrix showing who does the work, who owns the outcome, who must be consulted and who must be kept informed.

Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort

A product-prioritisation score that compares ideas using expected reach, impact and confidence divided by the effort required.

Must, Should, Could, Won't

A prioritisation method that separates essential requirements from important, optional and deliberately deferred work.

Root Cause Analysis

A structured investigation into the underlying causes and contributing conditions of an incident, followed by actions that reduce recurrence.