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Jargon

 Business loves jargon.  As a management consultant long time ago I was part of a cult spreading the gospel of how businesses can optimize and restructure and re-engineer.

To do so required intricate project management and program management and waterfall based roll outs of ERP software.  Who, what, when?  ERP was enterprise resource planning and was a way to integrate back office functions on a single platform to save money.

Then in the spirit of planned obsolescence came new tech and new process and new lingo.

Largely the domain of some wonk in the arcane science of managing people as a resource they came up with thoughts that said we cannot do complex projects with a waterfall approach.

We need to speed things up and that calls for creation of pods of people with differing expertise.  Now let us call them scrums.  A term I think borrowed from a rugby game.  No idea why.

This lingofication was bundled in an entire body of work now called Agile framework.  Jobs started being sourced by organizations to address any man or woman who could speak this new jargon and educate others to speak it.  LOL.

Eventually some IBMers came up with another idea.  Hey what if we now proclaim that this Agile stuff is stale? More biz...more moolah.

Why not?  So now they have SAFe which is an acronym for Scaled Agile Framework.  It is rife with new words that are basically new wine in old bottle.  And frankly it is a doozy!

Words like debt, to signify pending code fixes; refining instead of grooming (I guess shabby people refining poor code is now hip and we are talking people not in the oil business) and many such idiotic phrases are de rigueur.

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