Regular analyses on the blind spots that make projects drift. Every article also published in French.
Ten knowledge areas, eleven domains, three competence areas, or none at all: no two standards divide project management the same way. What they do agree on, without ever writing it down, is the order in which the areas get established.
Two referentials of equal standing put the contingency reserve on opposite sides of the baseline, and reverse the known and unknown unknowns on the way. Which pocket a sum sits in decides who may spend it, and what has to be redone afterwards.
Every risk register carries different columns, and nobody can say which text prescribes them. This article traces each field back to the referential that asks for it, and to the moment in the process when it gets filled.
No general project management standard defines the cost breakdown structure, and three incompatible versions of it circulate. This article establishes which one an organisation is actually practising, and what decides how deep the structure has to go.
A work package that spent less than planned can be the one in trouble. What earned value adds to a cost report, the two variances it produces, why one of them is counted in money, and where the method came from.
Analogous, parametric, bottom-up, expert judgment, three-point: five names on every list, and no two referentials agree on the list. What each one actually requires before it can be used, what decides the choice, and where the methods came from.
Project controls or project management: the phrase sets two things against each other that no referential puts on the same plane. What the standards separate is three acts, and which one is under way decides what a meeting is for.
Four serious referentials cut project indicators into four different sets of families, and the vocabulary standard of the discipline does not define the word at all. What settles the value of an indicator is a second axis, and it is not the one the market uses.
A work package reported at 60 percent can be three different figures, all of them correct. What progress actually measures, how the crediting rule is chosen, and why the first written rule got it backwards.
Risk, issue, uncertainty, contingency: four words that turn up in the same sentence and carry four different commitments. What each one answers, where they come from, and why a single French word keeps blurring the line.
Only one of four criteria appears in every definition, and it is not the one usually quoted. Six English-language references compared, the power/interest grid returned to its actual authors, and the 1963 report where the word first appears.
Five referentials define project, and they do not quite define the same object. What they agree on, what separates a project from an operation, and where a piece of work stops being one at all.
A schedule can show the same ten days of float on three different tasks. What that figure measures, how the two calculation passes produce it, and where the method came from.
Four link types, two of them barely used, and lags that most explanations leave out entirely. What a link actually declares about the work, where the four came from, and why a lag means something different depending on the arrow that carries it.
The bar chart is read in every programme review, and its origin story is mostly wrong. What a Gantt chart shows, what it cannot show whatever the tool draws, and why the date everyone quotes belongs to something other than a diagram.
Six bases for splitting a project's work are admissible, and no standard ranks them. So what decides? The answer is older than every standard on the shelf, and it changes what a work breakdown structure is for.
Standards spent twenty-five years moving from what a project includes to what it excludes. Where that boundary actually sits, why two legal systems put it in the same place, and what a scope statement has to carry to hold under a contract.
Two structures already exist on any contract programme, and neither of them says who answers for what. Crossing them does. What the crossing produces has a name, a single owner, and an object that existed for decades before that name reached it.
Referentials do not agree on what an organizational breakdown structure decomposes, and the disagreement is older than the acronym itself. What the OBS is for, how far down it goes, and which reading binds on a contract.
Four letters, and the referentials do not gloss them the same way. What the acronym actually settles is narrower than it looks, and where the grid came from is a shorter story than the one that circulates.
Committee, review, gate: on a programme under contract the three land in the same week, and only one of them commits anything. The standards settle which, and they do it on evidence most articles never cite.
Maîtrise d'ouvrage, maîtrise d'œuvre, sous-traitant: three positions an English glossary does not settle. Which texts define them today, who holds which decision on a contract, and why translating the role is the wrong move.
