IT Project Management Buzzwords and Phrases (Fun-filled representation)

If you are following Bollywood (Indian Hindi film industries), you must be aware of a scene from a popular Hindi movie ( I will let you guess the name of the movie) where the professor asked engineering students to Define “Machine”. One of the students replied, “A machine is anything that reduces human effort.” Since Professor was not happy with this definition, he asked another "Intelligent student" who replied it as “A machine is any combination of bodies so connected that their relative motions are constrained, and by means of which force and motion may be transmitted and modified, as a screw and its nut, or a lever arranged to turn about a fulcrum or a pulley about its pivot, etc, especially, a construction more or less complex, consisting of a combination of moving parts or simple mechanical elements, as wheels, levers, cams, etc.”

It looks funny, however, if you introspect, we as IT Project Manager have also changed our perspective over time and started representing the things in a complex way which could have been explained in a very normal and natural laymen language.

 Few of the most popular Project Management Jargons and Phrases being used are:

• Let’s leverage our resources
• Nine women cannot have a baby in one month
• We’re on a death march
• Let’s try thinking outside the box
• Why don’t we circle back on this?
• Due Diligence
• Gap Analysis
• Execution Metrics
• Attention to Detail

Project management is Imbibed in our blood and habits that we represent everything (work or non-work) with the same project management Jargon.

I have come across a very good example in which the Interviewer Asks the Candidate (for IT Project Management position), “How would you write in your resume that I changed a light Bulb”. The experienced Candidate replies after a small pause and thought “Single-handedly managed the successful upgrade and deployment of a new environmental illumination system with zero cost overruns and zero safety incidents!!!

 We Know It’s Time to Get Out of Project Management When…

• You refer to your other half as the budget holder.
• You write a Project Brief for your next holiday.
• You organize your family into a more efficient team-based structure.
• The "deliverables" for Saturday are shopping and washing.
• You mitigate the risk of your in-laws visiting.
• Finding yourself explaining what Gantt, PERT and CPM diagrams are to people down the pub.

 I explained this article as a personal experience with ‘IT Project Management’ and I am looking forward to working more with this area. This article was written as an 'opinion piece' and does not in any way demean the concepts of ' IT Project Management' or the various concepts of it.