Project Management Glossary
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Backward pass: a project network diagramming technique that determines the late start and late finish dates for each activity.

Baseline: the original project plan plus approved changes.

Benchmarking: a technique used to generate ideas for quality improvements by com paring specific project practices or product characteristics to those of other projects or products within or outside the performing organization.

Bottom-up approach: creating a WBS by having team members identify as many specific tasks related to the project as possible and then grouping them into higher level items.

Bottom-up estimates: a cost estimating technique based on estimating individual work items and summing them to get a project total.

Brainstorming: a technique by which a group attempts to generate ideas or find a solution for a specific problem by amassing ideas spontaneously and without judgment.

Budget at Completion (BAC): the original total budget for a project.

Budgetary estimate: a cost estimate used to allocate money into an organization’s budget.

Buffer: additional time to complete a task, added to an estimate to account for various factors.

Burst: when a single node is followed by two or more activities on a project network diagram.

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