Glossary

Terms and abbreviations you will meet at Northwind. If a term is missing, ask the owner of this page to add it.

Term Meaning
MSA Master Services Agreement. The umbrella contract with a customer. See SOW process.
SOW Statement of Work. Defines scope, fees and deliverables for one project.
NDA Non-disclosure agreement.
Amendment (AMD) A signed change to an earlier contract clause.
Fixed fee Price set for a defined scope. See Pricing guidelines.
T&M Time and materials: customer pays for effort used.
Change request (CR) A formal request to change scope, price or schedule. See Handling change requests.
Milestone A payment and delivery checkpoint in a fixed-fee SOW.

Delivery

Term Meaning
RAG Red, amber, green status used in status reporting.
DoD Definition of done. See Definition of done.
Acceptance The customer's formal approval of a deliverable. See Deliverable acceptance.
Escalation Raising a problem to a more senior person. See Customer escalation.

IT and security

Term Meaning
P1 Priority 1 incident, the most severe. Under SOP-001 a P1 must be acknowledged within 15 minutes and a bridge call opened.
Bridge call A dedicated call opened to coordinate the response to a P1.
MFA Multi-factor authentication. Mandatory for everyone under POL-IT-003.
VPN Virtual private network. See Connect to the VPN.
Access review A periodic check that access rights are still needed; done every 6 months under SOP-IT-003.

Policy and document IDs

Pattern Example Meaning
POL-HR-NNN POL-HR-001 HR policy (leave)
POL-FIN-NNN POL-FIN-002 Finance policy (travel and expense)
POL-IT-NNN POL-IT-003 IT policy (passwords and access)
POL-LEG-NNN POL-LEG-001 Legal policy (contract approval)
SOP-NNN SOP-001 Organization-wide procedure (incident response)
SOP-IT-NNN SOP-IT-002 IT procedure (backup and restore)

Document files carry a version suffix such as _v2. The highest version is current; lower versions are superseded.

Finance

Term Meaning
FY Fiscal year, equal to the calendar year.
INV Invoice number prefix, in the form INV-2026-NNNN.
PR Purchase request. See Raise a purchase request.

Owner: Henry Brandt - Last updated: 2026-04-02