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How Well Do You Speak “Project”?

January 15, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Definitions, Project Management Musings

How Well Do You Speak “Project”? (#2 in the series A Cynical Perspective on Project Management)
By Barry Otterholt

Project management is a specialty, and it has its own language. Resistance is futile.

  • Work breakdown structure - Shows how work will break down, before it does. No remedy shown.
  • JAD Session - Where everybody has a voice, and scope rapidly inflates.
  • Scope - A medicinal beverage, most commonly used to wash the odd taste out of our mouth following a JAD session.
  • Mini-spec - An analyst’s abbreviated interpretation of a user expectation. It should be flicked from the requirements quickly, before anybody notices it.
  • Gantt - Shows exactly what happens when, using a series of bars. After a few bars, you start to feel guilty about what happened when. You wisely keep it to yourself.
  • Dependency - The discovery that you’ve become married when you weren’t looking, to somebody that doesn’t even know the music you like, resulting in tasks for which you were unaware, but are now being kicked out for not completing.
  • Critical path - the shortest route to the door in case of an emergency, like when a stakeholder shows up.
  • Stakeholder - The one left holding the goods when all the cooks have left the kitchen.
  • Team Lead - a term originally referring to the plow-horse in front. Actually, still.
  • Broken links - The relationships you had before you joined the project.
  • Change agent - The person that disrupts your business, with the promise of a better life. Referred to as “parole officer” in some circles.
  • Org chart - Formalized pecking order, showing important peckers and peckees.
  • Low hanging fruit - Food for the hungry, that spoils on the limb because nobody looked up.
  • Contract extension - A prosthesis used when the natural contract proved insufficient.
  • Standard terms and conditions - The name of a nifty little game, originally created by lawyers, where nobody wins but the lawyers. You can upgrade from the Standard to the Premium edition of Terms and Conditions if you’d like to win, though few can afford the cost of winning.
  • TLAs - Anything worth saying can be reduced to a three-letter acronym. The accomplished project manager can string TLAs together to make an encrypted phrase that only other project managers can understand. Of course CIA is a TLA, so they know project management and you should watch what you say around them.
  • Methodology - Start here, end there. No thinking required. Of mice and men, this is for the mice.
  • Slack time - When you could have a smoke.
  • Referential integrity - When people refer to your integrity, even when the database is all messed up.
  • Exit Criteria - Conditions that prove you’re done. Most often created when you think you’re done and need to prove it.

If you can relate to this, you might have a problem. Go take it out on your FTEs!

Check the original Do You Speak “Project” for more of these Project Management Definitions.

Barry Otterholt, CMC, PMP

Barry Otterholt has been a project management specialist and coach for the past 30 years. He is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) and a Project Management Professional (PMP). He works with both public and private sector companies in the USA, Europe and Scandinavia. Mr. Otterholt was a Director with Microsoft, a senior consultant with Deloitte Consulting, and a COO with a nationwide consumer electronics enterprise. In 1988 he founded Public Knowledge, LLC to provide independent management and operational support to the public sector. More recently, he founded Stouffer & Company, LLC to provide as-needed project management services to fill an obvious skills gap in both private and public sectors.

Mr. Otterholt is an adjunct professor teaching project management at Northwest University. His essays on project management have been published in PMI newsletters. His runs a blog, Project Management Essays, where he muses about various project management topics.

Mr. Otterholt is a member of the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) and the Project Management Institute (PMI). He has a BA in Accounting and Computer Science and an MBA in Business Administration. He lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 and is filed under Project Management Definitions, Project Management Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Craig Brown wrote on January 17, 2009 - 6:31 am | Visit Link

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