project management lingo
I lurk on this great email list of project managers called PMClinic; it’s full of smart people who share war stories of (mostly software development) projects. It’s hosted by Scott Berkun (yes, him again) and each week one of the list members posts a challenging project scenario and the non-lurkers chime in with ideas and suggestions.
This week’s starter topic was a bit different though. The subject line was “Is there Project Management Lingo?” and there are about 60 some-odd responses, with people defining the terms they’ve come across; everything from “86’d” to “Whack-a-mole.” I took a few minutes to catalog all the terms (without definitions; I’m not a masochist); here they are[1], in alphabetical order.
- 86’d
- Action required
- All up
- Analysis paralysis
- Arrivadodging
- Baseline
- Bear race
- Blocker
- Boiling the ocean
- Cleaner
- Clue bat
- Clue bus
- Clue by 4
- Coconut shuffle
- Come to Beavis meeting
- Come to Jesus meeting
- Conceptual integrity
- Consistify
- Constant time to completion mode
- Crunch mode
- Dead in the water
- Death march
- Drive
- Eat your own dog food
- Eating the elephant one bite at a time
- Eight days a week
- Engage
- Engagement model
- Enterprise phase
- Fitting ten pounds of crap into a five pound sack
- Gantt flotsam
- Gelled team
- Greenshifting
- Happy status
- Herding cats
- Heroics
- Hit with the scope bat
- I’m going to have to push back on that
- In the weeds
- Keeping you up at night
- Looped in
- Lugubrious
- Mitchy2008
- Mocks
- Nine women can’t have a baby in one month
- Open kimono
- Overcome by events
- Permalancing
- Permanent prototype
- Programmatics
- RACI
- Rat hole
- Ready fire aim
- Red hat period
- Redshirt
- Run up that hill
- Schedule chicken
- Scope
- Scope creep
- Scrub
- Second system effect
- Setup for failure
- Setup for success
- Shovel ready
- Showstopper
- Sign up
- Silver bullet
- Slip
- TEM
- TPS Report
- Then a miracle occurs
- Ticket on the clue train
- Tiger team
- To the right
- Triple D (dollars, date, deliverables)
- Upside risk
- Whack-a-mole
My personal favorites are three of the ones I’d never heard before; compound words that even if they didn’t mean a thing just sound great: consistify, arrivadodging and permalancing.
[1] Note that a few of the items in this list actually came from the comments in Scott Berkun’s similar blog post about the PMClinic thread. Of course, this is not meant to be a full list of every single bit of project management lingo ever uttered by any project manager anywhere. Have one that’s not here? Leave it in the comments.