Acronyms for Project Managers

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If you use social media to manage your projects, why not reduce your typing with a set of project management acronyms? Bob McGannon and I decided to jump start the list with these (mostly) tongue-in-cheek acronyms. If you have suggestions to add to this list, share them in the comments!

SOS – Sponsor Over Shoulder – Can’t share truthfully in this message. 

Example: Talk later, SOS.

DT – Disappearing Team member – The issue that arises when team members’ work gets reprioritized, and your schedule suffers.

Example: My head hurts. My schedule has the DTs.

MIA – Methodology in Advance – Choosing the methodology to deliver a project before understanding what the project is for or what its outcomes are supposed to be.

Example: We’ve decided the MIA, so fingers crossed that it will work. 

RSAP – Ready Shoot Aim Project – Project deliverables were defined before needs were identified, understood, or confirmed. 

Example: It’s an RSAP. The stakeholders will never fund this!

LOL – Lousy Outcome Limit – The project’s performance has reached the point that it will definitely be cancelled. 

Example: We’re at LOL. I’m looking for a new job!

BTW – Behind Task Waffling – A string of excuses for why a task is behind schedule.

Example: That team gives me no deliverables, just BTW.

ASSER – Assuming Requirements – The requirements aren’t sufficient because the project team assume they know what stakeholders need.

Example: Our requirements are nothing but ASSER.

DITY – Do It to Yourself – Moving forward with a project despite knowing that fatal issues exist.

Example: It’s a DITY. This project won’t be pretty!

IOB – Incredibly Obscure Benefit. A questionable business justification for moving forward with a project. (Related to the essence of political campaign advertising)

Example: It’s an IOB business case. We’ll never deliver those outcomes!

FAQ – Frequently Altered Quality – Repeatedly watered-down quality levels from the original level as the project progresses.

Example: We keep FAQing this project, so we’re going to end up with a Dollar Store-quality product.

Stat-they – Status of They (Versus stat-us) – The make-believe status that key stakeholders (they) want you to share versus the accurate statUS that the project team reports.

Example: We gave them our status, but they really wanted a STAT-THEY.

UNCLES – Unrealistic Constraints Leaving Everyone Stumped – Project constraints that are unrealistic but senior management won’t change them.

Example: This project’s impractical and plagued with UNCLES.

OMG – Overly Modified Goals – Changing the project’s success criteria to keep it going despite diminished outcomes.

Example: OMG is the only reason this project is still alive.

SHOT – Sponsor Hung Out To-Dry – When politics or a powerful key stakeholder commandeers your project and sends it in a totally ludicrous direction.

Example: I have a sponsor, but he is SHOT.

POV – Point of Variance – The degree of variance from plan that can best be described as “This is when the screaming started.”

Example: We hit our POV, and the management review turned into a shouting match.

WARNS – Warnings Repeated with No Support – Sharing the reality of the project that management just won’t accept (or can’t handle), 

Example: I’ve tried WARNS, but management isn’t listening!

SPOC – Singular Point of Crisis – Your project’s point of no return. (Similar to LOL.)

Example: We’ll never deliver this; we’ve hit our SPOC.

TBA – To Be Admonished – The penalty project managers receive for trying to tell the truth.

Example: Management isn’t helping. They’re planning to TBA me.

TGIF – Thank Goodness It’s Finalized – The cheer a project manager shouts when they mistakenly believe project planning is finished.

Example: I yelled TGIF, but then reality hit.

CRISP – Crisis Right Inside Simple Project – When a project looks simple but has hidden complexities.

Example: I thought this project would be easy, but now I’m in  CRISP.

WTF – Wobbly Time Forecast – Very questionable estimate for completion of a critical task.

Example: My project schedule is a mess, its full of WTFs.

WOAA – When Objectives are Achieved – The surprised exclamation the team shouts when project objectives are achieved. 

Example: WOAA, we got an award!

GOFWOP – Going Forward Without a Plan – When insufficient planning will doom a project. 

Example: Management is in a hurry. This project will definitely GOFWOP.

STAIN – Stakeholder indecision – Sponsor and stakeholders don’t make decisions and delay project progress.

Example: Our project status is STAINed. We’re twiddling our thumbs until the stakeholders make up their minds.

SWAG-E – Somehow, we are gainfully employed.

Example: This project is a mess, but at least we’re SWAG-E.

Coming Up

Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. I’m happy to know that you have found it helpful and enjoy seeing your comments and questions.
I am taking a short break, so this is my last article for 2023. My articles will resume the week of January 8th, 2024. The end of the year is a great time for renewal, so I hope you enjoy this time and start 2024 with energy, motivation, and enthusiasm!

 

Marlene Chism is an expert in conflict, anger management, working with difficult people, and having difficult conversations – things most of us want to avoid. Despite the tough topics, she’s a truly lovely person. In this LinkedIn Learning Office Hours, we’re going to dig into some of the concepts she teaches for dealing with conflict. We’ll spend the rest of the session providing practical advice for dealing with conflict and other difficult situations. Bring your questions about the conflict you need help with, and we’ll provide advice for as many as we can fit in!I hope you will join us on Wednesday, January 17, 2024, 11am MT, 1 PM ET for this no-nonsense, advice-packed session on dealing with conflict with composure.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 55,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Warning Signs that Your Project Schedule Isn’t Feasible

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As a project manager, you must be able to recognize that your project schedule isn’t feasible. That way, you can proactively address issues, mitigate risks, and increase the likelihood of project success. Here are common warning signs that your project schedule needs work.

  • Building and sharing a schedule before scope definition is stable. When project objectives and scope are still in flux, a schedule is nothing more than a rough guess. Teams may be anxious to get to work, but it’s too soon to share a schedule if scope continues to change. This schedule will mislead people about when deliverables will be available. It also makes life miserable for the managers who allocate people to the project, because they have to replan staffing for the viable schedule when it’s available. Best practice: Ensure your scope is stable before distributing a schedule.

  • The schedule depends on heavy workloads. Team members often juggle multiple tasks on a project. And many have day-to-day business support responsibilities that aren’t tracked by the project. This combination can produce an excessive workload for a team member, which leads to burnout, decreased productivity, and increased risk of errors. Best practice: Understand the percentage of time each team member can dedicate to the project and schedule accordingly.

  • The schedule doesn’t consider competing priorities. The most critical project team members often deal with competing priorities (in addition to day-to-day bustiness duties), such as working on other projects, resolving business issues, reviewing project change requests, and taking on work delegated from their managers. These other duties take time and can affect the person’s availability on your project. Talk through what your crucial team members do in the organization and allocate their time to project tasks with this in mind.

  • The schedule was built on unrealistic estimates. Overly optimistic estimates plague a lot of project schedules, which means trouble. The uniqueness of project work makes it difficult to estimate. Plus, people might not be trained on estimation techniques. One way to improve estimates is to use PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) estimation. Estimators provide three estimates for a task: optimistic (O), most likely (ML), and pessimistic (P). People don’t pull these numbers out of the air. They think about the work and consider what might happen (good and bad. This analysis improves the accuracy of the estimate. The typical formula for calculating PERT estimates is: (O+(4*ML)+P)/6.

  • Note: There is another way to improve estimates. Get into the habit of comparing final actual effort to your original estimates. These comparisons help project team members understand what happens in projects and how much effort different types of tasks take.

  • Stakeholder managers don’t buy into the schedule. Managers who allocate their people to a project have a big impact on the project schedule. If managers don’t think the schedule is realistic, they aren’t likely to allocate their people to work on the project. Review your project schedule with the managers whose people are needed for the project. Make sure they have bought into the schedule and the project outcomes.

Have your schedules suffered from gotchas I haven’t mentioned? Do you regularly look for other warning signs on your schedules? If so, share with us in the comments section.

For more about project scheduling, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course.

Coming Up

Marlene Chism is an expert in conflict, anger management, working with difficult people, and having difficult conversations – things most of us want to avoid. Despite the tough topics, she’s a truly lovely person. In this LinkedIn Learning Office Hours, we’re going to dig into some of the concepts she teaches for dealing with conflict. We’ll spend the rest of the session providing practical advice for dealing with conflict and other difficult situations. Bring your questions about the conflict you need help with, and we’ll provide advice for as many as we can fit in!I hope you will join us on Wednesday, January 17, 2024, 11am MT, 1 PM ET for this no-nonsense, advice-packed session on dealing with conflict with composure.

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 55,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________