Management Speak

[WhiskyDisco]

Allan L said:

We were happy to use the traditional PGW* methodology.

• Pure Guess Work

When we triage a ticket, generally we consider it an SEP*

• Someone Else's Problem.

[Dinlowgoon]

Joey Deacon said:

My particular favourite was during a company wide "there are not going to be any redundancies" meeting telling us that we were entering a 90 day consultation period. A director stood in front of the whole company and told us how the company was to become "a vertical centre of excellence", and at the end asked us if we had any questions. Every part of me wanted to ask what "a vertical centre of excellence was" but I didn't have the balls. Surprise, surprise 90 days later I was redundant.

Edited by Joey Deacon on Monday 16th September 11:27

I worked for a big computer corporate and during the first half of the ‘90’s the workforce halved. It was a fortnight away from going under by all accounts.
But there was never a single redundancy,it was all ‘Skills rebalancing’
;-)

[Scabutz]

Jonno02 said:

DoubleD said:

I need a GO.....NO GO on this project.

Go, No Go? We arent launching a fking spacerocket!

This one I actually semi-disagree with.

We use go/no go a lot, quite an important test depending on industry. You would introduce a go/no go check on manufacturing equipment etc to ensure spec is met.

However, it has made its way into 'office speak' e.g. "this report is a go/no go for this project" - no, you're using the phrase entirely wrong.

Yeah that's DoubleD means. Its a fine checklist to confirm each team / department is happy to go a head. But when marketing use it before launching a website its idiotic

[Shakermaker]

Jonno02 said:

However, it has made its way into 'office speak' e.g. "this report is a go/no go for this project" - no, you're using the phrase entirely wrong.

Many of the examples in this thread are just that, surely, and maybe there's some overlap with the "Walt" thread elsewhere, but basically, someone hears a catchy sounding phrase and then tries to implement it everywhere thinking they're a candidate on the The Apprentice, but fail to realise that those are the candidates who never succeed.

There's a separate category for "bad analogies" I suspect.

[Cotty]

Dinlowgoon said:

I worked for a big computer corporate and during the first half of the ‘90’s the workforce halved. It was a fortnight away from going under by all accounts.
But there was never a single redundancy,it was all ‘Skills rebalancing’
;-)

I think there is some negativity to making people redundant. I have heard of people being given a lump of money and told to leave but they didn’t call it redundancy.

[bucksmanuk]

4 years ago, in a boardroom with all the other site management listening to 2 Americans explain the corporate R&D direction and how each site in the group would concentrate on certain product types. It was full of management bullst bingo alluded to above. Graphs were flashed though on the screen, and all sorts of numbers were used to justify the decisions.
My boss (a very wise technical director) was watching all this, and calmly asked “where do these numbers come from? - I’ve never seen them before”
One of the Americans said “they are all MSU numbers”
Boss: “what on earth is an MSU number?”
American: “MSU - make sh!t up”
The 2 Americans thought this was hilarious….
Multi-million pound decisions were being made on the back of this…..

[anonymous-user]

bucksmanuk said:

4 years ago, in a boardroom with all the other site management listening to 2 Americans explain the corporate R&D direction and how each site in the group would concentrate on certain product types. It was full of management bullst bingo alluded to above. Graphs were flashed though on the screen, and all sorts of numbers were used to justify the decisions.
My boss (a very wise technical director) was watching all this, and calmly asked “where do these numbers come from? - I’ve never seen them before”
One of the Americans said “they are all MSU numbers”
Boss: “what on earth is an MSU number?”
American: “MSU - make sh!t up”
The 2 Americans thought this was hilarious….
Multi-million pound decisions were being made on the back of this…..

Doesn't surprise me, at my girlfriends company they decided to move a warehouse abroad and use a different freight forwarder because of the cost savings. These cost savings had been calculated by several highly paid consultants who had dragged the job out as much as possible to ride the gravy train to it's final destination.

After they had moved the warehouse one of the permy employees looked at the spreadsheet, realised all their assumptions and calculations were wrong and that it was actually costing them more money.

They then decided that due to brexit, moving their warehouse abroad was not the best move so they got another warehouse in the UK and started to store lots of their product back in the UK. Of course Brexit never happened so they were left with loads of stock that went out of date and was no use to anyone.

You really could not make it up.

[AstonZagato]

Allan L said:

Joey Deacon said:

Company I used to work for decided to implement SCRUM and when asking for time quotes would ask for a SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess). All seemed like an excuse to have loads of pointless meetings rather than actually get any work done.

We were happy to use the traditional PGW* methodology.

• Pure Guess Work

Most of the quotes I receive seem to be based on the TOANADI* principle

* Think Of A Number And Double IT

[StanleyT]

Ex-governmental still purse string tied quango.

HR director of the division presented this to us in the canteen one lunch. "There will not be any forced redundancies. As you are aware, we are undergoing a negative growth period and there will be a correction, primarily to agency and also to staff numbers as appropriate, up or down we cannot say currently".

A wag asked (I wish it was me, but no) "Are you suggesting that to preserve staff jobs there will soon be a number of Contractors Under Notice of Termination in the company".

Every since then negative growth period has been matriculated in the company to suit to the appropriate situation "Stan, did you finish that AGILE scrum project yesterday"? "Sorry boss, I had a negative delivery blip yesterday". And to agency staff (as long as the bosses aren't listening) "Your last week, oh are you a Contractor Under Notice of Termination"? Neither of which have gone down well with the lers, sorry, Managers.

[PurpleTurtle]

Scabutz said:

Jonno02 said:

DoubleD said:

I need a GO.....NO GO on this project.

Go, No Go? We arent launching a fking spacerocket!

This one I actually semi-disagree with.

We use go/no go a lot, quite an important test depending on industry. You would introduce a go/no go check on manufacturing equipment etc to ensure spec is met.

However, it has made its way into 'office speak' e.g. "this report is a go/no go for this project" - no, you're using the phrase entirely wrong.

Yeah that's DoubleD means. Its a fine checklist to confirm each team / department is happy to go a head. But when marketing use it before launching a website its idiotic

Much as I hate management speak, I'm going to defend 'Go/No Go'.

I'm in IT across several business areas, including marketing and the launch of websites, either whole new sites or significant changes to existing ones.

In both cases there will usually be a large number of stakeholders (yeah, I know, sorry) involved, all of whom have to get their st together (their 'ducks in a row', as it were) on a specific date, often across multiple providers and time zones. We have Go/No Go calls and I find that it actually focuses everyone's mind on getting stuff done by an agreed date, because nobody wants to be the person on the call explaining that we cannot go live because they have not done their bit. It's a clear, concise wording of what you're trying to achieve. Do we all go ahead, or not?

If it were called the'lift off meeting' or some other such bks pretending that we were trying to put a man on Mars I would agree, but Go/No Go is OK in my book.

Go pick on some other low-hanging fruit, yeah?!

[Scabutz]

But do you all sit in a room and do it verbally?

Go flight?
Go
Go comms?
Go
Go web devs?
No go, theyve fked off to the coffee machine again.

[Genuine Barn Find]

We had a Director who’d been promoted well above his ability level.
Management meetings were a particular speciality of his..... if only down to his sheer incompetence.
However, on this occasion he was at his dreadful best. He pitched up.... was evidentially completely unprepared, even though he had sent out the agenda a week in advance, looked at the agenda in front of him.......

Screwed it up, looked at us and said.....

I’m not working with an agenda today. Today we are going to ‘freestyle’”. Not a hint of shame that he was blagging. Nope, today we are going to freestyle as it will allow us to be more creative.

He was finally found out a few years later..... only to pitch up at a competitor in an even more senior role.

His other (often used) phrase was “keep doing what you are doing” - utilised when he obviously didn’t have a clue how to increase revenue or sort out problems (that he didn’t have the first clue how to sort)

[Second Best]

Joey Deacon said:

Doesn't surprise me, at my girlfriends company they decided to move a warehouse abroad and use a different freight forwarder because of the cost savings. These cost savings had been calculated by several highly paid consultants who had dragged the job out as much as possible to ride the gravy train to it's final destination.

After they had moved the warehouse one of the permy employees looked at the spreadsheet, realised all their assumptions and calculations were wrong and that it was actually costing them more money.

They then decided that due to brexit, moving their warehouse abroad was not the best move so they got another warehouse in the UK and started to store lots of their product back in the UK. Of course Brexit never happened so they were left with loads of stock that went out of date and was no use to anyone.

You really could not make it up.

I went for a beer with a buddy of mine who works in heavy engineering and I'm amazed how similar your story is (highly doubt it's the same company as there are only six women who work there and all are married).

Said company moved a couple of large industrial units from storage in the UK to somewhere in Europe because some graduate with a clipboard thought they could save cost. One of the time-served guys questioned the decision and it was soon found that various complications due to logistics (moving oversized freight in Europe over weekends), tax implications (whoever owned the goods needed to organise some form of tax payment), as well as accessibility (the company was contracted to deliver a unit within a 12-hour notice period, which would be difficult if the units were stored nearly 1000 miles away) made the whole prospect a little short-sighted. Unfortunately the managers had already signed the idea off, and soon found themselves in a position where they had to ship the entire set of units back to the UK and re-purchase the original storage - the previous company had nearly doubled their rates as they could see the writing on the wall - plus also pay for the remainder of the minimum term contract for the European storage company, even though it would sit empty for the next 20 months, and to top it all off had to lease two competitor units for an exorbitant sum while they moved all their units back and sorted the legal stuff out.

The initial cost saving of £120,000 ended up costing the company just shy of £3,000,000 instead.

[johnwilliams77]

Second Best said:

went for a beer with a buddy of mine who works in heavy engineering and I'm amazed how similar your story is (highly doubt it's the same company as there are only six women who work there and all are married).

Said company moved a couple of large industrial units from storage in the UK to somewhere in Europe because some graduate with a clipboard thought they could save cost. One of the time-served guys questioned the decision and it was soon found that various complications due to logistics (moving oversized freight in Europe over weekends), tax implications (whoever owned the goods needed to organise some form of tax payment), as well as accessibility (the company was contracted to deliver a unit within a 12-hour notice period, which would be difficult if the units were stored nearly 1000 miles away) made the whole prospect a little short-sighted. Unfortunately the managers had already signed the idea off, and soon found themselves in a position where they had to ship the entire set of units back to the UK and re-purchase the original storage - the previous company had nearly doubled their rates as they could see the writing on the wall - plus also pay for the remainder of the minimum term contract for the European storage company, even though it would sit empty for the next 20 months, and to top it all off had to lease two competitor units for an exorbitant sum while they moved all their units back and sorted the legal stuff out.

The initial cost saving of £120,000 ended up costing the company just shy of £3,000,000 instead.

[98elise]

Jonno02 said:

DoubleD said:

I need a GO.....NO GO on this project.

Go, No Go? We arent launching a fking spacerocket!

This one I actually semi-disagree with.

We use go/no go a lot, quite an important test depending on industry. You would introduce a go/no go check on manufacturing equipment etc to ensure spec is met.

However, it has made its way into 'office speak' e.g. "this report is a go/no go for this project" - no, you're using the phrase entirely wrong.

Agree that it has a very specific use. I work on projects which normally have a go/no go decision during the go live phase. It's a specific task in the plan, and everyone knows what it means. It's been the same at every place I've worked.

[DoubleD]

98elise said:

Jonno02 said:

DoubleD said:

I need a GO.....NO GO on this project.

Go, No Go? We arent launching a fking spacerocket!

This one I actually semi-disagree with.

We use go/no go a lot, quite an important test depending on industry. You would introduce a go/no go check on manufacturing equipment etc to ensure spec is met.

However, it has made its way into 'office speak' e.g. "this report is a go/no go for this project" - no, you're using the phrase entirely wrong.

Agree that it has a very specific use. I work on projects which normally have a go/no go decision during the go live phase. It's a specific task in the plan, and everyone knows what it means. It's been the same at every place I've worked.

Possibly, but people who say it still sound like they have watched Apollo 13 a little too often!

[Scabutz]

Got an email yesterday saying this.

"Follow the link to kick-start the preparation for your conversation cycles. This reflection will help you to prepare for the first of many dialogues with your manager, for feedback and personal growth".

Anyone know what the fk it means? Tried Google translate but that came back with nothing.

[PurpleTurtle]

Scabutz said:

But do you all sit in a room and do it verbally?

Go flight?
Go
Go comms?
Go
Go web devs?
No go, theyve fked off to the coffee machine again.

No, but now you mention it, I'm going to try to work this in for a laugh.

You reading me, Tranquility Base?

[mywifeshusband]

They're running an on-going training events for Managers where I work. It was originally entitled "Don't Worry, be Happy" but has now progressed to "It's a Wonderful Life - Don't Worry be Happy".

I'm looking forward to it as you can guess.

[KAgantua]

mywifeshusband said:

They're running an on-going training events for Managers where I work. It was originally entitled "Don't Worry, be Happy" but has now progressed to "It's a Wonderful Life - Don't Worry be Happy".

I'm looking forward to it as you can guess.

Do you work in a bank?