Part of the reason they don’t know what it means is because so many people insist on using it as a piece of bullshit jargon where it makes no sense.
So when they do come across someone using the term properly, they muddle everything up and make it so much harder.
If people left terms alone rather than deciding ‘ooh, that sounds important’ and appropriating it for nonsensical uses, then it would all be fine.
people across organisations should be talking about actual due diligence. The problem is that some of them are talking shite instead under that banner.
That’s the problem with so many terms.
However, it is undeniable that the language used within agile often verges on the absurd. It is a legitimate project management practice but that doesn’t make the way in which things are framed within it any less ridiculous.
It’s also widely appropriated and misused across organisations. I worked in a public sector team that claimed to work in agile ways. What that meant was they’d simply renamed standard team meetings ‘scrums’ and used ‘sprint’ to describe the steps in their spreadsheets setting out the project timelines over the next year or two. It’s not agile when you start off specifying exactly what will happen in ‘sprint 15’ before the project has even begun. Even if you call your spreadsheet a ‘roadmap’.
Legitimate terms are quite easily turned into organisational bullshit by the ways in which they are used. Defending the legitimacy of the terms when used appropriately doesn’t change the fact that Dave in marketing is talking absolute shite using those terms.