Microspeak: On-board (verb)

Here are a few citations. On a list of activities:

• On-board a new team member.

Presumably they mean bring on board. What makes this particularly interesting is that they didn’t convert a noun to a verb; they converted a prepositional phrase to a verb, demonstrating once again the malleability of the English language. Here’s a snippet from a blog post which seems to use the same meaning, but dispensing with the hyphen:

Over the past 4 weeks, we have been onboarding customers slowly.

On the other hand, there are usages whose intended meaning I can’t quite figure out. Some titles from documents I don’t have access to:

How to On-Board Tools on the Extranet
On-Boarding Kit

And a subsection from an old document:

On-Board Schedule

Milestone	Target Date	Status
Attend a client planning meeting	Dec. 2005	Complete
Frooble analysis		Meeting daily with ABC team to map out migration
On-Board to client dev	Feb. 2006
Client dev	TBD
On-Board to client test	TBD
Client test complete	TBD
On-Board to DEF	TBD
DEF sign-off by GHI	TBD
File migration	TBD
Go-Live	TBD

ABC, DEF, and GHI were TLAs I did not understand. Frooble is a made-up word substituting for the actual word in the schedule. (And yes, “Go-Live” is a noun.) As a final example, there is somebody at Microsoft whose official job title is Senior Onboarding Manager. If you can figure out what on-board means, you’re smarter than me.

Pre-emptive clever comment: Verbing weirds language.