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Glossary of Terms

To help you get the most out of MSP Planner, we've defined the key professional scheduling terms used throughout the application and documentation.

A​

  • Actuals: The real amount of work posted in Jira worklogs, used to compare planned effort against actual execution.
  • Actuals-Reconciled Resources: System identities (Violet icon) that represent users who have posted time in Jira but haven't been explicitly added to the planning pool.
  • Assignment: The link between a task and a resource, including the amount of time (Units) the resource is dedicated to that task.

B​

  • Baseline: A saved snapshot of a schedule's start and finish dates, used as a point of reference to track project drift.
  • Bottom Pane: The resource view where capacity and allocations are managed.

C​

  • Capacity: The total available working hours of a resource over a specific period, determined by their calendar and max units.
  • Critical Path: The longest sequence of dependent tasks that determines the minimum possible project finish date.
  • Critical Path Drift: A high-risk scenario where the critical chain shifts from the original baselined tasks to a new, unexpected set of bottlenecks.

D​

  • Dependency: A logical link between two tasks that defines the order in which they must be performed (e.g., Finish-to-Start).
  • Duration: The total elapsed time between the start and finish of a task.

E​

  • Explicit Synchronization: The "Push/Pull" model that requires a conscious action to move data between the timeline and Jira, serving as a quality and security gate.

F​

  • Float (Slack): The amount of time a non-critical task can be delayed without impacting the project's overall finish date.
  • Fixed Duration: A scheduling mode where the duration is constant, and adding resources reduces the required work per person.

H​

  • Hybrid Schedule: A schedule containing both Jira-linked tasks and "schedule-only" tasks/milestones.

I​

  • Identity Preservation: The technology that ensures tasks and resources maintain their IDs when exported to and imported from MS Project.

L​

  • Lead: A negative offset in a dependency that allows a successor task to start before the predecessor finishes (overlap).
  • Lag: A positive offset in a dependency that adds a mandatory delay between tasks (waiting period).

M​

  • Max Units: The base capacity setting of a resource (e.g., 100% for full-time), used to calculate available hours in the histogram.
  • Milestone: A task with zero duration that represents a key project achievement.
  • MSPDI: The XML standard used for the lossless exchange of project data between MSP Planner and Microsoft Project.

R​

  • Reality Gap: The delta between planned effort and actual worklogs, used to identify optimistic estimation or under-performance.
  • Round-Trip: The process of exporting a schedule to MS Project, having it edited externally, and importing it back into Jira without losing identity links.

S​

  • Scheduling Mode: The rule (Fixed Work, Duration, or Units) that defines how the engine recalculates timing when a variable changes.
  • SNET (Start No Earlier Than): A semi-flexible constraint that prevents a task from starting before a specific date.
  • Split-Pane: The dual-view workspace featuring the Timeline (Top) and Resource View (Bottom).

T​

  • Text30: The reserved custom field in Microsoft Project used by MSP Planner to store the identity hash for lossless round-tripping.
  • Timeline: The professional planning layer where schedules are modeled, calculated, and visualized.
  • Triple-Point Analysis: The governance process of comparing the Baseline (the promise), the Planned (the current guess), and the Actuals (the reality).

Z​

  • Zero-Byte Architecture: A security model (via Atlassian Forge) ensuring that zero bytes of project data are transferred to external third-party servers for processing or storage.