Recycled QWA: project manager dictionary
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
- accounting
- don’t worry about this, there’s another department that takes care of it.
- B2B
- what we call our business stuff now.
- B2C
- what we call our customer stuff now.
- business need
- a term without any literal meaning used as an idiom to say, “My VP is bigger than your VP.”
- communications strategy
- the written guides for how to write to each other; the longer the better as the more that you can communicate up front, the less they’ll read and the more you’ll be able to say, “I warned you about that.”
- deadline
- the chance for you to apply the hard won knowledge behind your liberal arts degree to decide how long it will take 5 guys on HB1 visas to finish and debug 250,000 lines of C++ while building it out properly on DEC, Solaris, and Linux boxes.
- deliverable
- what others are responsible for at such time as the PM indicates; see deadline, your mini-Ouija board and key-chain Magic 8-Ball for more.
- dependency
- programmer double-talk for “I’m too high and mighty to do that for you.”
- documentation
- the official record of what happened and how it all works; remember that the messenger makes the easiest target so keep it light—you can always assume the bugs and missed features will be taken care of in version 2 so there’s no reason to go into details in the current documentation.
- feature set
- a fancy way of saying, “We really don’t know what we need so just whip something up and we’re sure it will be fine.”
- human resources
- protection; job security; keep their senior manager in lunches and margaritas.
- kickoff
- the initial project meeting; as in football whence the metaphor is drawn, there will be somewhere around 11 huge, angry antagonists trying to take the project away and run it back, right through you.
- milestones
- successfully reached ones are résumé bullet points, the others are guidelines for personnel changes following the project.
- P2P
- what to say to hose down the programmers who bring up a partner’s failure to fulfill contractually obligated data delivery.
- post-mortem
- where you get your next raise; during this “20:20” part of the project you must make sure slippage outweighs milestones for other groups and the reverse for yourself; make these points orally! The documentation phase is long gone.
- PowerPoint
- that thing that whats-her-name will always help you with right before a presentation.
- programmer
- serf.
- project
- 15 hours of meetings out of the 40 alotted to do an otherwise straightforward piece of work; fluff; filler; corporate pork.
- project schedule
- the thumb screws; punitive tightening encouraged.
- quality assurance
- the group that tests drafts of the project; while you’d expect them to have the most power, they’re actually the least well paid and easiest to replace, hence they are easy to bully.
- risk management
- the process of minimizing the impact of project set-backs and failures by ensuring the project manager is the least responsible for key pieces.
- ROI
- something to do with money; bring it up when the serfs get noisy about new hardware, adding team members, or extending the testing phase.
- security
- check the budget—if it’s not specifically paid for in there then this isn’t part of the project.
- scope
- the limits of the project; make sure to nail down your parts of the scope but remember that the technical managers rarely turn in a good or complete technical requirements doc so you’ll be good for blaming any scope creep on them.
- scope creep
- hostile feature negotiation.
- slippage
- retaliation.
- software development engineer
- what to call the serfs to their faces.
- stakeholders’ meeting
- the meeting of those who will be invited to the launch party.
- status report
- a frequently updated tallying of where things stand; like all writing based on actual events, it can be improved with minor dashes of fictionalization.
- technical requirements
- the badly written (step in immediately if it’s turning out to be any good) contribution to the project outline from the tech group manager; make sure the requirements are suitably vague so you can hang it on the techies if things blow up.
- triage
- the process of assigning priorities to the missed project goals; it’s best to get the low level stuff first because it makes the project look like it’s progressing rapidly; the big stuff will take care of itself and if it doesn’t, you can just point out that you didn’t have enough time.
- user acceptance testing
- the phase of the project where the shit can go sour—keep the QA and testing documents terse to help head that off.
- UAT
- something to do with European tax laws; let the biz dev people sort it out.
- XML
- what to say to rein in the programmers who start talking their RDBMS/UML mumbo-jumbo in meetings.
More at business and project terminology.





