I ended up sending a mishmash of a few people’s suggestions…
Thanks for all the help, I could never have sounded that ambiguous on my own!
Don’t forget you must be ISO 9000 compliant.
So, do all your base belong to us or them?
What you want quality or deniability? :dubious:
:ahem: What I meant to say was…
Lets not start moving the bar up until we have had time to evaluate our readiness to advance our core competencies to a higher level and what ongoing resource utilization will be associated with that move.
So we’ll put it in the toaster and see if it pops?
I think I’ve hung out with the Marketing Department too much.
Don’t forget to eliminate non-value-add to create a win/win synergy.
drachillix, can I steal this from you? I sooo want to use this at our next staff meeting.
(Disclaimer: My once college-level English skills have been transformed by years of work experience. Therefore, I’m almost fluent in Corporate, Government, and FEMA–a language that deserves separate mention since it rivals Military for the highest AUPS [Acronym Usage Per Sentence].)
My SDMB search skills are horrible (I still can’t find the thread about the 1920-Style Death Rays or the Bottom of the Marianas Trench for 20 minutes. Once. In 1960.) but I remember a thread about the ultimate SMDB movie where every Doper’s suggestion was implemented.
In that same vein, I’ve done a mash-up of previous responses infused with (un)healthy doses of Corporate, Government, and SMU (Stuff Made Up). Here’s my stab at it:
Team-Leader,
In response to your original e-mail message (re: the actioned item and its associated issue experienced by users), your request has been acknowledged and disseminated among the Team Members. FYI, ownership of this concern has been accepted by the Team and your request has been granted Priority Level Alpha. In actioning this item, please be advised that a think-outside-the-box, proactive, results-oriented, solutions-based standpoint has been taken by the Team. Subsequently, an ad-hoc PLATF (Priority Level Alpha Task Force) has been established and assigned to handle the issue.
The PLATF will be tasked to develop a PLARIP (Priority Level Alpha Response Implementation Plan) to address the concern. The PLARIP will consist of three IPPAS (Implentation Plan Priority Action Segment). IPPAS Stage I will consist of surveying the users to determine if they or related stakeholders are encountering the issue. IPPAS Stage II will consist of developing countermeasures to address the action item. Each countermeasure will be assessed for IFFs (Implementation Feasibility Factors), including but not limited to EICs (Estimated Implementation Costs), ETCs (Estimated Times of Completion), and ESRs (Estimated Security Risks). IPPAS Stage III will consist of greenlighting the most appropriate countermeasure based upon examination of each countermeasure’s set IFFs and implementing it.
Please be advised that the countermeasures in the PLARIP will be evaluated and selected according to protocols specified in the ISO 9000, which requires that each individual countermeasure will be subject to a unified-variety stovepipe-based approach review process to maximize resource support capabilities.
During completion of IPPAS Stage III, a Schedule of Completion to include milestones, objects, and goals will be developed by the PLARIP and disseminated among the user base and Team members. SITREPs will be produced and circulated every twelve hours to provide accurate and timely updates on PLARIP progress to touch base and close the loop with all relevant stakeholers. When the PLARIP has been fully implemented and completed, the PLATF will produce and circulate an Evaluation Report to determine and anticipate future issues developing from your concern. Please be advised that additional funding and resources may be necessary to advance certain core competencies to a higher level in order to improve ongoing resource utilization.
If you have any questions or concerts, please direct future inquiries to TeamMember42, the POC for the PLATF. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Congratulations twopiecesofeight…my eyes glazed over about halfway through the second paragraph!
Damn, twopiecesofeight, that’s scary. And good!
One comment though: “Milestones, objects, and goals.” I’d suggest “objectives” instead of “object.” In my experience, corpspeaking managers love “objectives.”
Good use of acronyms and initials, and I’m kind of glad to see you resisted the impulse to call your task force the Fast Action Reponse Team. 
Overall, superb job!
Or you could call your team the:
Objective Hierarchal Sourced High Intensity Team
or OHSHIT.
Or you could just say “I’ll look into it, and get back to you.”
Ghanima, thanks for the compliment! 
Spoons, thanks for your kind words and sharp eyes. You’re right: managers love the word “objectives”; I think my subconscious was rebelling against me as I was working towards the end (“Stop being so evil. Shorten the word!”). On the other hand, I think it’s freakin’ scary that you actually read the whole thing. :eek: My own eyes were glazing over as I hit the preview button several times to catch last minute typos. (Not surprised that I still missed one.)
Rico, I’m adding your entry into my acronym dictionary.
Ethilrist, now where’s the fun in that? 
Now that I’m reading my crap a day later, I noticed that I still could have added a couple of other things I missed from previous posts: “leveraging synergies”, “go forward”, “non-value-add to create a win/win synergy.”
To tell the truth, the government is taking big steps to force more concise writing. According to one of the writing instructors of the USDA Graduate School, the White House issued a directive saying that all future government correspondence should be written with a Fog Readability Index of 8.0, the equivalent of an 8th grade comprehension level. Note that this runs counter to my college professors who taught me how to write at a Fog Index of 18.
This thread makes me twitch. And the Baby Jesus cry. Proactively.
This reminds me of a commercial jingle from my youth.
Action Jackson
is his name
Actioning Items
is his game
Y’know, we could probably leverage that knowledge on a going-forward basis to create synergistic scenarios that demonstrate our commitment to both our internal and external stakeholders.
Hey, I’m just blue-skying some ideas here.
Or this one:
Faster Uniform Confirmation Knowing Your Objective Ultimate.
I’ll leave it to you to figure out the acronym.
I work on a help desk, and I will sometimes send my boss an e- mail complaioning that some of my co-workers have let a trouble-ticket go unactioned for several days. I dunno, to me, it sounds neater than saying “they haven’t done a damn thing with it”.
No piece of corporate-speak, no matter how verbosely and obscurely crafted, is complete without the word PARADIGM. See if you can fit “low-hanging fruit” in there somewhere, too. That will make an executive get stiff in the pants.
Aaaaiiieeee!!!
:: goes catatonic ::
See, that’s the thing with us technical writers. We’re trained to use the language to express things clearly and transparently. We’re trained to educate the reader, to lead the reader from the swamp of ignorance and confusion to the brilliant sunshine of Actually Knowing What’s Going On.
Too often, this is the opposite of the way Marketing ends up, letting technical clarity give way to emotional persuasion… because Marketing is driven by the great question “Can We Sell It”, rather than “Does It Work”. Selling something and making it work is difficult, so too many marketers take the easy route of selling something that doesn’t work, mining short-term profit while passing their costs on to the larger society.
The best persuasions use simple language, and even the truth (gasp!), to persuade. But that’s hard work. So the bullshitters fall back on obscurity rather than laser-like clarity. And this is a sure sign of either incompetence or deception.
All these incentivized productistic motivational paradigms are just emotional persuasion using complex words to intimidate the listener or convince the listener that there is some complex technological justification for the proposed action.
Such is the reputation of technology, that emotional persuasion must cloak itself in the garments of technical competence, even when it is doing things that are far from competent. From my viewpoint, that is Just Wrong.
Liberate the language and the minds of the people! End obscurantist obfuscation! Let the light clarity shine through!
<This has been your Sunspace rant for today>
Only if you partner with that executive.
I once told one of our store managers who has the additional job of being the …oh, Christ, it’s too painful to describe…let’s just say she helps run training meetings, but she’s just a manager like the rest of us. I told her I’d devised a drinking game based on how many times she or the regional manager use certain phrases during a meeting, and that after the meeting, at the end of the day, I take my meeting notes, count up the tick-marks in the margins, and have a shot for each one. She failed to see the humor in it.