Core Concepts & Glossary
The vocabulary you need to operate AIPM.
AIPM runs each project through the five PMBOK phases, with every deliverable and every gate signed off by three different parties — a maker, a checker, and an approver. The terms below are the ones you will meet on almost every screen. Read them once and the rest of the help pages will make sense at a glance.
Glossary
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Project | The top-level container for a body of work. A project has phases, requirements, deliverables, risks, work items, and approvals. |
| Phase | One of the five PMBOK process groups — Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, Closing — that the project moves through in order. |
| Gate | The sponsor’s required sign-off on a phase before the project can advance out of that phase. |
| Deliverable | A tangible artifact the project produces — a charter, plan, report, or register — with its own acceptance criteria. |
| Requirement | Something the project must achieve. Each has a priority and acceptance criteria. |
| Risk | A potential threat to the project, recorded with its probability, impact, mitigation, and an owner. |
| Sign-off (a.k.a. approval request) | The formal, evidence-based approval record that uses the three-role model. Its presented wording is snapshotted immutably when it is made. |
| Maker | The party who submits the evidence of what was built or done. |
| Checker | An independent reviewer — who must differ from the maker — who records pass or fail. |
| Approver | The decision-maker — who must differ from both the maker and the checker — who approves or rejects. Can only approve once the checker has passed. |
| Sponsor | The accountable human who owns the project, signs off its phase gates, and closes it. |
| Stakeholder | A person with a stake in the project, classified by Mitchell salience — power, legitimacy, and urgency. |
| Evidence package | The read-only bundle an approver reviews: the acceptance criteria, the maker’s evidence, the checker’s result, and a PASS / NOT PASSED badge. |
| Delegation | A time-boxed, revocable transfer of sign-off authority to another approver. The separation-of-duties and sponsor-only rules still apply. |
| Audit trail (audit log) | The append-only, tamper-evident record of every action, tied to the actor’s identity. |
| Acceptance criteria | The explicit yardstick by which a checker and approver judge whether a deliverable or requirement is “done”. |
See also
- What is AIPM — the big picture and the governance model.
- Phase Gates — the five-phase lifecycle and its sign-offs.
- Deliverables workflow — how an artifact moves from draft to approved.
- Approving with evidence — what an approver sees and decides.