Terms for Project Practice

Use these meanings within the courses. A governing law, contract, or standard can define a term differently; use that definition where it applies.

Definitions

Term	Meaning in this series
Acceptance	An authorized decision, based on examination, that an identified result satisfies stated conditions for a stated purpose.
Accountability	The obligation to explain and answer for a responsibility or decision.
Actual expenditure	Cost recorded as incurred. It is distinct from a commitment or forecast.
Agent	An AI system that drafts, compares, calculates, searches, or checks work under a person's direction, directly or through another agent's brief. It can carry assigned execution and make choices within authority. In Northbank it holds no project appointment and cannot perform the reserved approval or acceptance acts or carry the person's accountability for reliance.
Applicability	The relationship that makes a requirement govern the work under its stated conditions.
Approved basis	The identified requirements, decisions, and limits approved as a reference for stated work. Applicable external obligations retain their standing.
Assumption	A proposition used in reasoning while its truth remains unconfirmed.
Assurance	Activities that provide justified confidence in the work and its intended result.
Authority	The right to make a stated decision or perform a stated act.
Baseline	An identified reference state placed under a defined change process.
Brief	The instruction that gives an agent one assignment: its purpose, the identified basis with revision and status, the output wanted, its limits, the checks to perform, and the conditions under which it must stop and refer to a person or the directing agent, with reserved decisions reaching the person who holds them.
Budget	The amount authorized for a defined scope.
Capability	What a participant or tool can do. Capability does not establish authority.
Change control	The process for assessing, deciding, communicating, and implementing departures from a controlled basis.
Claim	A statement that something is the case.
Commissioning	Activities that establish an installation's readiness and behavior under defined conditions before the relevant operating handover.
Competence	The knowledge, skill, experience, and judgment needed for the assigned work.
Configuration	The identified arrangement and characteristics of the product or system.
Configuration control	Control of changes to the product and its defining information.
Constraint	A limit that the work must respect.
Contingency	An identified allowance for uncertainty under the project's rules. It is not permission to change scope.
Decision basis	The evidence, requirements, assumptions, options, and consequences considered in a decision.
Deliverable	An identified result that a participant must supply under the assignment.
Dependency	A relationship in which one activity or result needs a contribution or condition from another.
Document control	Identification and control of document revisions, status, access, distribution, and retention.
Estimate	An assessment of a quantity, cost, or duration with a stated basis and uncertainty.
Evidence	Information that can support or challenge a stated claim.
Examination record	A person's record of their production direction, including consequential agent-written briefs, and what they checked in the returns they relied on, what they found, and what they changed. References to recoverable material can replace copies. It shows the person's own contribution to agent-assisted work.
Finding	An identified observation or conclusion that needs a defined response.
Forecast	The present assessment of a future outcome. A forecast does not amend an authorized commitment.
Governance	The arrangement of authority, accountability, decision rights, and oversight for the undertaking.
Handover	Transfer of an identified result and its continuing responsibilities to a receiving party.
Independence	The condition in which an examination's basis, preparation, method, or examiner differs enough from the producer's to detect errors the producer's work shares. A check by an agent that shares the producer's model, brief, or reference may lack it. Agreement with a shared basis shows consistency, not correctness.
Interface	A boundary through which parts, disciplines, people, or organizations exchange a contribution or interact.
Issue	A present condition that requires attention or a decision.
Judgment	A person's consideration of purpose, evidence, uncertainty, consequences, and the responsibility they will carry.
Operating envelope	The range of conditions under which the product must perform.
Professional responsibility	The obligations that attach to the person's professional practice. An internal assignment does not erase them.
Project basis	The identified purpose, requirements, scope, constraints, and decisions used to develop and execute the project.
Project engineering	Coordination of the technical basis, design contributions, interfaces, and technical grounds for the combined result.
Project management	Organization and control of the undertaking's commitments, work, resources, decisions, and delivery.
Proposal	A suggested action or change that has not yet received the required decision.
Provenance	The origin and history needed to understand where information came from.
Readiness	Satisfaction of the conditions required to start a stated activity or rely on a stated contribution.
Requirement	A needed result or constraint under an applicable authority or accepted assignment.
Responsibility	The work, decision, or duty that a person or organization must carry under the applicable arrangement.
Return	An agent's report of an assignment: the output, the scope completed, the checks performed, the limits, and any open choices. It distinguishes what the agent prepared from what it actually changed.
Review	Examination of the work, its basis, and its conclusions by a person with suitable competence and assigned purpose.
Revision	An identified version of a document or other controlled item.
Risk	The relationship between uncertainty and its possible effects on objectives or affected parties.
Scope	The work and results included in an assignment, with its boundaries and exclusions.
Stakeholder	A person or organization that affects the undertaking or is affected by it.
Status	The declared condition of an item under the relevant process, such as draft, approved, or superseded.
Validation	Examination of whether the result is fit for its intended use under the relevant conditions.
Verification	Examination of conformity to specified requirements.
Verification debt	Work produced but not yet examined against its requirements or for its intended use. It grows when work reaches examiners faster than they can examine it, and each item may carry an error into dependent work.
Warrant	The grounds that justify a claim for the proposed reliance.

An authorized decision can establish or change commitments, permissions, and assigned responsibilities, but it does not establish unexamined physical behavior or performance. A declared status needs supporting evidence for the proposed reliance.

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Issued 1 November 2026 · Source 54a6c22a9d ↗ · Markdown