Phrases project managers say
I’ve mentioned before that a Project Manager is a leadership position, and as a leader you are the driving force behind the growth of your team’s capabilities. Successful project managers know how to communicate clearly and they pick their words carefully to enable their team to effectively work towards their goal. Another characteristic of succesful managers is that they are not afraid to fail. Simply put, some people just go one step further and “invent” words, causing us to just want to laugh out loud. Today we celebrate “management speak” with some examples from the office:
- “Jirafy, Jirafication” — If you jirafy an issue, it means that it now resides on Jira. Jirafication is the act of jirafying something.
About Jira: The product name is a truncation of Gojira, the Japanese word for Godzilla. Gojira is roughly translated to mean “gorilla the size of a whale”! We may now assume that “to jirafy something” means that a gorilla the size of a whale will take care of the issue. Problem solved.
2. “sync meeting” — This phrase is often used by an over-excited manager who needs to put empasis on the collaboration aspect of a meeting: “Let’s have a sync meeting!”
3. “Sexy” — “wanting something to be sexy” is a round-about way of saying “we need your best effort because the output should be very engaging”. There’s also “extra sexy” which typically means that you need to do the work all over again.
4. “Operationalise” — This means to put something into operation. It is too much for me and I’m the daughter of two nurses.
5. “Platform agnostic” or anything “agnostic”— If someone is agnostic it means that they believe that… (pauses for a sec) Wait, if I google “agnostic” does it mean that I’m agnostic-agnostic?
Agnostic is a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God.
I just need to mention here “everyone’s favorite” management phase:
“Do you confirm?”
Whenever someone asks me this question, I ALWAYS think of this particular scene from the “Catch me if you can” movie.
I’m sure you have many more examples coming from your office. Thanks for reading!
