to be utterly sick of this maddeningly nonsensical bit of corporate wankspeak?

[MossyOilTank]

What is with the phrase "the piece" ... for example, "it's the piece around engagement with stakeholders" ... "the piece on communicating key messages" ... "the piece about maximizing outputs". IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING.

More likely because the package is customarily termed 'Fucking Powerpoint'

As in

'Where's the Fucking Powerpoint?'

'Oh, God. He's going to read out a Fucking Powerpoint for 45 minutes, isn't he?'

'Handouts? You know they'll just be half size Fucking Powerpoint slides in black and white that nobody can read and don't contain any useful information, don't you?'

'Oh, joy. another Fucking Powerpoint to sit through'

'Nineteen days overdue and all she's done is add some animated WordArt titles on Fucking Powerpoint?'

'I can't edit the document or paste that slide. He's done it on Fucking Powerpoint and then saved as a .pdf'

'Why on earth would anybody save the only version of the logo on the system as a .pdf of a Fucking Powerpoint file instead of a high resolution image?'

I agree with most posts here, but not this. Pretending to be sailors makes EVERYTHING more exciting.

Definitely... developing this idea probably needs a thread of its own. Of course, a lot of commonly used idioms are nautical in origin so we're already land-ho on this voyage.

Really? So not the building you're in then, or the desk, chair, other furniture, phones, scanners, boardroom tables, computers, water coolers, machinery, factory equipment, tools, lorries, vans, forlift trucks, cranes, diggers, company cars, trains, boats, planes, shelving and what's on them, raw materials, stocks of goods for sale, the cash in the till, the money in the company bank account, the money your trade customers owe you?

Youre right. The problem is my failure to enter into the spirit of the all-hands. Best bring my bottle of rum to the next one.

That's the spirits!

"I don't have the bandwidth to look at this right now."

Youre right. The problem is my failure to enter into the spirit of the all-hands. Best bring my bottle of rum to the next one.

Right, me hearties, let's hoist sails, and cast off! We'll be sailing close to the wind so we'll need to be agile (no! Don't get into a scrum ffs, wrong sporting metaphor) and hike right out, it's ok to dry capsize but no turning turtle. All hands on deck... no I didn't mean you can mess with my PowerPoint ...

My team and i always have to have a debrief after a meeting with my boss's boss to see if we can work out what he was actually talking about.

Do you refer to this as a ‘wash up’?

The public sector is full of people having pre-mortems and wash ups around meetings. It really fills your diary up with shite.

And people holding the bloody pen while picking a choosing which bits of agile terminology they fancy using wildly out of context next.

Everybody in my work place uses "myself" and "yourself" in the wrong way at least 80% of the time. They think it makes them sound smart but its does the opposite.

The other truly amazing thing in the civil service is the depths of dreadful things that are regularly done with slides.

Make a slide is not a suitable way of presenting what should be a 15 page word document.

Even more so when everyone else has taken the opportunity to see how much content it’s possible to fit on a single fucking PowerPoint slide.

I did a job interview once where there was a male a slide task. They suggested having three separate sections on the slide to squeeze in the background, a complex statistical analysis (with several diagrams) and recommendations (with explanations). It’s not an A0 poster; it’s a bloody PowerPoint slide.

Presenting it all squeezed on a single slide doesn’t make it less content-heavy. And it most certainly does not make it ‘easier to digest’.

Just awful.

Again, doesn’t make the terms any less wanky. They have just become part of your DNA, embedded in your culture, values that you live and breathe

😉

Oh I remembered one in my last job. One of our “core competencies “ (wankspeak in itself) was to be “obsessed with customer service”. Obsessiveness isn’t really a positive thing for me

I find it hard to believe that anyone is actually defending the bad metaphor salad that is agile terminology. It may well be legitimately used across all sorts of project management activities, but that doesn’t make it any less absurd that you have a ‘scrum master’ facilitating ‘ceremonies’.

If you’ve reached the point that you can’t appreciate the ridiculousness of the terminology, you probably need some perspective.

I remember some guy at my last job describing himself as a lean sigma black belt or some such. I mean wtf. Why “black belt”? Does it not just mean he’s done all the training or whatever?

I’ve been in my career 15 years maybe I should call myself a Jedi master or something

Let me guess - recruitment?

Lol, I’m a master black belt. The ‘belts’ are tiers, in ascending order they are white, yellow, green, black, master black.
You need training, certification and practical application. Lean as a philosophy is a sensible thing, but the way it’s packaged and monetised by consultants is gimmicky and a waste of time.

Didn’t mean to sound like a twat in the above - I know many Lean practitioners are insufferable, especially those using Japanese terminology too much to make it sound important and inaccessible.

'Scrum' is certainly a silly name - apparently chosen because it's about teamwork, but don't you need 2 competing teams pushing against each other for it to be a scrum?

I get that it means something in your job and it’s probably taken a lot of hard work and expertise, but to lay people who don’t have a clue it’s pretty meaningless!

I use lots of these words in the corporate environment completely non-ironically. It is what it is.

Someone said they’d ‘revert back’ the other day. I thought I’d accidentally emailed Dr Who

I personally love a bit of triangulation.

What does wash up mean?

It would be a bit tiresome to do that al the time if it's useful terminology

That's unacceptable to myself.