Sitting in a boring Corporate review meeting, a summary of improvements made in a failing program.
One of the primary charts used to track progress in these improvement procedures is called the “WORM” chart. Noone I have asked has been able to explain why it is called that, but it’s always in the title of the slide, and it’s the slide we spend the most time staring at during these meetings.
It shows all the open tasks, their due dates/progress and the cumulative number of tasks finished on time vs late.
So, to recap, the Title of the slide is “WORM Tool” and the x-axis is always the abbreviation “Cum Finishes.”
I feel like a 13-year-old boy trying not to giggle every freaking time one of these comes up. (:smack: pun unintended.)
With much fanfare, a new and improved peer review system was introduced for our designs. As usual, nothing significant changed except the name.
The new name? Work Product Evaluations. WPE’s. Pronounced “Wippies.” Yay.
I made a poster showing the old group Devo with the slogan “WPE it Good!” Most of the group was old enough to get the reference.
(for the whippersnappers: In the 80’s the chorus of their hit song was: “Whip it Good”.)
LOL! I keep picturing the group of giggling young MBA Interns who developed this slide deck. But why has no one ever fixed it? Are we all just too ashamed to admit that we see it? Or was the original presenter so high up and so proud of his/her work that it became an Emperor’s New clothes situation with nobody willing to be the one to point out the problem?
We have a project at our company called Anaconda. I hear Sir Mix-a-Lot every time they mention the project name. And the fits of childish giggles take over.
Cracked was just doing an article about Panasonic developing a new computer in 1996. And they decided to license the name of an American cartoon character as part of the promotion of their new product. They chose Woody Woodpecker, who’s apparently still big in Japan. And one of the features they were advertising was the then new touch screen. They had a whole campaign worked up around the slogan of “Touch Woody - the Internet Pecker” before somebody at the last minute decided to run it by an American for her reaction.
We track “Wrong First Time” batches at our plant – those that fail on analysis prior to any rework to bring them into spec. So, every month, we get a “WFT Report”… which my brain refuses to read as anything other than WTF Report. Occasionally, the guy who sends it out actually typos it, and it is the WTF Report.
No one I work with over 30 understands why I snicker at this (I’m 46, by the way).
We had an employee recognition program called SOAR Points wheere people could earn points for making improvements. SOAR was some acronym that noone knew. It didn’t take long for the program to become Sore Points where people bitched about things that needed to be improved.
SOAR? It can be Students Of Academic Reknown, or Safety, Organization, Achievement and Respect. A nearby school district uses the first, ours uses the latter. I suspect most school and company programs mean the latter as well.
Where I worked, we had a new project codenamed BOHICA. Most people thought it was some Spanish word that one of the South American designers had come up with, but it turned out to be a acronym: Bend Over, Here It Comes Again…
