Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On the go(zay masta) in Japan again

Cool cat the Japanese are Tokyo at dusk  My second visit to this land of the rising sun after almost a decade. Back then clearly I was wet behind the ears product manager and likely didn’t pay attention to all (efficient) things Japanese. But today I did and of course continue to be impressed. It is as much the obvious stuff like on time travel that is both clean and comfortable and all that which makes it possible. The impressive landmark and landscapes that these humans have put together despite their cramped (or because of it) surroundings and precarious geological conditions could amaze a novice architect among us. But it’s also the little things that someone had to think about which have a phenomenal impact on day to day lives that make the Japanese stand apart. Below are few random examples- 1. Providing a very fine machined wooden toothpick in every packet of wooden chopsticks. The said chapsticks are simply set on the To Go counter of any food vendor/ convenience store wher...
Post a Comment
Read more

A few good books

 On an informal mission to read one book a week as long as the eyes allow for such ambition. Fiction or non is not important as long as it entertains and /or educates. To that end the past few weeks have brought a bounty in the form of some wonderful and then not so engaging literature. Among the notables are - Non fiction category: 1. Good arguments by Bo Seo (how to handle a dispute or debate the most efficient way possible) 2. Genesis by Eric Schmidt (and former US Secy of State Henry Kissinger, who recently passed) - how AI might affect our lives as we know it 3. One in a billion - Zarna Garg (an autobiographical look at an Indian born American woman with a bindi narrated in a standup format - yes it is at times cliched but still funny) Fiction: 1. Personal by Lee Child (a vigilante story with Jack Reacher the giant, nomad protagonist of Child's novels goes hunting for a sniper) 2. Ramayana unraveled by Ami Ganatra (she might disagree about it being a work of fiction but oh wel...
Post a Comment
Read more

Back in DC

This time for a tech conference in the realm of what else? AI. But applied to an oft neglected space called Knowledge Management. The latter is a community of practice that focuses on analyzing, organizing and making available reams of data that have been gathered over time by various functions within an organization for anyone in the company to utilize. This function or process is ripe for applying AI agents (or agentic AI framework) and optimize for better outcomes. It was informative. More rewarding was getting acquainted with folks who practice this craft as well as learning of what they see in the corporate or public sectors. Since the venue was Washington DC it also afforded me the chance to take evening strolls albeit the weather was trying. With wind chill in the single digit it still is a glamorous place to perambulate through history absorbing what this country has been through since its founding days. I was able to visit the place Lincoln was killed along with his monument t...
Post a Comment
Read more