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Project Management vocabulary · Schedule & Time

Dependency

Meaning in project management, with examples

/dɪˈpendənsi/nounCore term

In project management, dependency means: A link between two tasks or deliverables where one cannot start or finish until the other has started or finished.

In Turkish: bağımlılık, ön koşul

How it is used

Important in scheduling and in risk reviews. Dependencies can be internal (inside the project) or external (on another team, supplier or project). People identify, map, manage and track dependencies.

Example sentences

  1. We have a dependency on the security team: we can't go live until they approve the firewall changes.

  2. Let's map all the external dependencies before we commit to a date.

Common collocations

  • external dependency
  • manage dependencies
  • dependency on
  • critical dependency
  • critical pathThe longest chain of dependent tasks in a project. It sets the shortest possible finish date, so any delay to a task on it delays the whole project.
  • taskA single piece of work that one person or a small group can complete, usually with an owner, a start and end date and a link to a bigger deliverable.
  • RAID logA single document or table where a project tracks its Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies, each with an owner and a status.
  • Gantt chartA bar chart that shows project tasks as horizontal bars on a timeline, so you can see when each task starts and ends and how tasks depend on each other.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Schedule & Time

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