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The Power of a TLA
November 7, 2011 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings
The Power of a TLA
By Barry Otterholt
Two choices. Talk their language, or baffle them with yours.
Your investment in education is seldom the concern of a customer. It’s how you talk that matters. Think about it. Hearing from a doctor that you have papillomavirus gets your attention. Your immediate reaction isn’t “Gee, I wonder where this Doctor went to school,” or “I wonder how many hours a night she had to study.” You’re thinking “Is pampa-whatever-it-is life-threatening? Is it communicable? How did I get it? Will my children get it? Actually, what is it? Oh… it’s a wart?” The patient moved right past the question of credibility with that single foreign term. The Doctor is in the lead and the patient is instantly transformed into a follower.
Much is the same with project management. We not only have our own language, but we have reduced much of it to TLAs. So if our patients - who we refer to as stakeholders - want to hear our opinion in terms they can understand, we have the increased credibility that comes from a two-step translation. First we patiently unbundle the acronym into the full three-word phrase, and search for a look of understanding. Knowing full well that the three-word phrase will mean little more than the original TLA, we translate the phrase with obvious compassion for the person that doesn’t understand it. And they become our followers.
Some project managers make up their own TLAs, but I think that’s self-centered. The PMBoK has plenty of TLAs to go around. Here are a few that are proven crowd pleasers:
- TLA - Three Letter Acronym
- WBS - Work Breakdown Structure
- PDM - Precedence Diagram Method
- AoN - Activity-on-Node
- EVM - Earned Value Method
- CPM - Critical Path Method
- EMV - Estimate Monetary value
- RAM - Responsibility Assignment Matrix
- RACI - Responsible Accountable Consult Inform format (whoops, that’s a FLA)
- CPI - Cost Performance Index
- SPI - Schedule Performance Index
- CCB - Change Control Board
After you unbundle the TLA, you can follow with any translation of the phrase you want. Remember, it not the translation that matters. It’s the fact that you had to give it in the first place that makes you the leader and them the follower.
One last tip. You might want get a full-length mirror so you can practice the deliberate calm you’ll want to exhibit for your followers. Body language is very important when baffling.
Barry Otterholt has been in project management for 30 years. He is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) and a Project Management Professional (PMP). He works with public and private sector companies in the USA, the UK and Scandinavia. Mr. Otterholt was a Director with Microsoft, a senior consultant with Deloitte Consulting, and a COO with a nationwide consumer electronics enterprise. He enjoys teaching project management at Northwest University and writing his essays on project management which have been published in PMI and IMC newsletters. He lives near Seattle in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
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