It started out in finance, but the term has crept into more mainstream usage (at least within Microsoft) and along the way picked up its own meaning: Where did we net out on this? Customers want you to net out the business value. Note any significant changes to the forecast and explain the reasons why. Net out changes to start conversation. ...
I have only two citations, so it may not be proper Microspeak. We're efforting that for you. They're not just trying, they're efforting. Solution efforting seems to fall in a gap between teams so there's no clear owner or resourcing focused on it. Bonus jargon: resourcing. Actually, that one sentence came from a longer document packed with ma...
In finance, the net is the total after you have cancelled positive values against negative values. For example, if you took in $30 and paid out $20, then your net is $10. In Microspeak, this term has moved into project planning and has undergone redoubling, so it's not just net; it's net net. The doubling of the word was probably added to create a...
Management likes to use the word focus. They like it so much, that anything important is called a focus. That's an interesting scenario, one which we hope to address, but it's not our main focus. We're focusing on three features for this release. But how can you focus on more than one thing? The first citation implies that there's more than on...
I have been fortunate to have been spared exposure to this particular corner of Microspeak, but others have not been so lucky. Have you actioned on this ask? It's not clear whether actioning on something means that you've started it or you've finished it. As a result, this is another case of using jargon to impede communication. The inventors...
Many years ago, to see whether anybody was paying attention, a colleague and I slipped the made-up word "coceptualize" into a document. Nobody said a thing. Either nobody read that part of the document, or they did and thought it was a real word.
I ran across an old document that contained a phrase I hadn't heard before: The Plan for the Plan for the XYZ Team Summary XYZ is at ZBB and we are now at a recall class only bug bar until RTM. The team has also started working on a plan for a plan to address the requests made from the XYZ Leadership Team several months ago. Details of the p...
Here's another sentence that's so loaded with buzzwords and buzzphrases I'm not sure what language it's written in. I just want to have creative control over how my audience can interact with me without resorting to complex hacking in a way that is easy to explain but ups our blogging audiences sats to a new level that may also stimulate a devel...
Larry Osterman discussed the buzzword T-shirt sizing, which means "making extremely rough estimates in terms of a small number of predefined categories." The term comes from the traditional way T-shirt sizes are specified in the United States. Instead of having T-shirts in sizes 4, 5, 6 and so on, there are only a small number of sizes: Small, med...
To have a lot on one's plate means to have a lot of tasks and responsibilities. We shouldn't give this task to Bob. He already has a lot on his plate. (Or: He already has a full plate.) At Microsoft, this common English language idiom is treated as a normal part of the language. The metaphorical plate has become a synonym for assigned tasks an...
