Actioning a blue-skies approach outside the box

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
We've been hearing about 'milestones' at work a lot this week, as in 'what's our next milestone with this project?' and so forth. I guess as a term it does convey a subtly different meaning from outcome, target, goal etc, but it still seems a bit daft and self-important when used in connection with what is really quite mundane work.
 

blacktulip

Pregnant with mandrakes
The one that is really giving me pause right now is "synergies". Introduced myself to a new guy at work the other day and when he opened his mouth that kind of stuff was all that came out.
 

blacktulip

Pregnant with mandrakes
We've been hearing about 'milestones' at work a lot this week, as in 'what's our next milestone with this project?' and so forth. I guess as a term it does convey a subtly different meaning from outcome, target, goal etc, but it still seems a bit daft and self-important when used in connection with what is really quite mundane work.

This reminds me of The Wire's repeated misuse of the word "epiphany", which has numbed it all the way to the point of blah.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Actually, I'll stand up for "milestones", and by association "roadmap" - I can't think of a short plain-english way of saying "sets of things that you expect to have accomplished on a project by a given time". I think here we're moving into specialized vocabulary for project management rather than meaningless management mumbo jumbo. Obviously it's kind of different if you're using it to describe making the coffee rather than a major software project or whatever, though.

I did hear a sales person in a company-wide presentation talking about "touching" clients the other day - I think they meant "talking to" or something, but there was definite sniggering when they talked about how they'd touched the client in a number of places even before the first meeting.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
it depends what your'e talking about, definitely. My personal experience is that this kind of language (milestones, outputs etc) is used to push everything towards being measured in statistical terms, even in cases where there are so many variables that this is hopelessly reductive. Especially when you're working with people, this doesn't work; I can see how it's much more suited to talking about technical projects.
 
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Slothrop

Tight but Polite
it depends what your'e talking about, definitely. My personal experience is that this kind of language (milestones, outputs etc) is used to push everything towards being measured in statistical terms, even in cases where there are so many variables that this is hopelessly reductive. Especially when you're working with people, this doesn't work; I can see how it's much more suited to talking about technical projects.
Yeah, I've mostly used it for big complicated software projects where you have a whole load of stuff to get going from scratch, and the milestones help you to keep some handle on what your short-to-medium term goal is - eg "get the basic function working", "get a demoable user interface", "get it running on real servers", "get all the bells and whistles working nicely", "release it to paying customers"...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I heard "low-hanging fruit" a couple of times the other day - always makes me think of a big pendulous scrotum.

A particularly obnoxious one I hear at work a lot is "let's take this offline", meaning, "let's talk about it in private outside of this meeting".
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
arrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh :eek:

Also, team leaders and group leaders here seem to have become "teamleads" and "groupleads". The language thing isn't really an excuse since everyone here speaks fluent English.

In fact there's probably less pronoun abuse (the dreaded "yourself"/"myself" etc.) here than there was in my old job in the UK civil service.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Dear colleague,

You are hereby invited to join the one day “Introduction Day” as part of the Onboarding Program for new employees...

Jesus Christ. Can I be waterboarded instead, please?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
If anyone can make head or tail out of:

...committed to and pro-actively owning and driving of ambitious but realistic targets with the [...] clusters.

("clusters" may be taken more or less to mean "groups")

I mean what the actual fuck? How the hell do you "pro-actively own" anything? Christ alive.
 

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
These are awful

http://agencywank.tumblr.com/

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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
the last one is deeply sinister, but absolutely true. That could be Apple's tagline. Let's create more empty desires for things, people, so that no-one is ever satisfied!
 
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