Tag Archive | office

Deciphering the 123 Most Common Business Acronyms

By Kat Moon

Ever feel like your co-workers—or, worse, your boss—are speaking to you in a different language? No, I’m not talking about your team suddenly deciding to conduct a meeting entirely in French. I’m talking about what often seems to be the language of the business world: acronyms.

While some of us have the guts to ask for clarification when we have no idea what’s being said, others of us cringe at the thought of asking potentially “stupid” questions. Well, to everyone in the latter group: Today’s your lucky day. We’ve rounded up abbreviations for the most commonly used terms that you’re likely to run into at work (or more likely, in an email).

Better yet, they’re categorized by department, so you can prep before a meeting with your finance, technical, or marketing teams. (And because we’re pretty sure that, regardless of your role, you don’t want to be the only one who nods with a confused smile when there’s a RFD because the CTR for your website decreased and a QA test is required by EOD.)

GENERAL

BID: Break it down

COB: Close of business

EOD: End of day

EOM: End of message

EOT: End of thread

EOW: End of week Read More…

November 14, 2012

in Bits and pieces, Business, Humour
3 Comments

Do you speak ‘Project’?

Project management is a specialty, and it has its own language. Resistance is futile.

Scope – It’s what has to be done. Always too general for some and too specific for others. Never right.
Resources – Funding and people authorized for the project. Never enough and always in the wrong denominations.
Schedule – How much time you have to get it all done. Never enough.
Project Manager – You. The person responsible for everything, and in control of nothing.
Sponsor – The one that wanted it in the first place. The one that shudders when you walk in because you always bring a problem, and give them way too many details.
Customer – The group that want things their way.
Vendor – The other group that wants things their way.
Users – People addicted to the old way.
Escalation – A process that defies gravity, and moves problems uphill.
Documentation – The last task in a project, or later.
Flowcharts – Cubicle art.
Team – Your best friends. The group that, when asked who caused a problem, forms a circle and each person points to the left.
Work Group – An oxymoron.
Oxymorons – People that take more than their share of oxygen from a project.
Project Plan – A deliverable assigned to the most annoying person on the project, who doesn’t recognize his or her work is done after the project has started and is going according to plan.
Almost Done – Where you are after Day 1 of the project. What you say when the “80% done” answer quits working.
RFI – Request for Information. A request for a customized marketing document.
RFP – Request for Proposal. A request to take a monkey off a customer’s back.
RFQ – Request for Qualifications. A request for a customized marketing document. A good source of boilerplate information for the RFP.
RFQQ – Adds a price quote to the RFQ. Generally from a vendor that has too little information from a customer that has too little understanding. Binding.
RFK – An important reminder that even the best project managers can find themselves in a bay of pigs.
Proposal – A document of sweeping generalizations.
Testing – What development is called after the development schedule has passed.
Testing – What the end-users do when the testing schedule has passed. Sometimes called Post-implementation Support.
Process Reengineering – Today’s processes, turned sideways.
KPIs – Key Performance Indicators. Objective measures of failure, most often advocated by opponents. Never tracked.
CSFs – Critical Success Factors. An early view of the blunders you will certainly make. Always tracked, but never called CSFs.