Lots of organisations like to name their projects. This has obvious benefits, but it does sometimes lead to some odd project names.
The worst I encountered was “Project Table”. I wasn’t there, but I have a mental image of a roomful of execs desperately looking around the room, trying to come up with a name: “Project Ceiling? Nah. Project Door? Used that one last year. Project Window? Too obvious…”
Corporate drones of the Door - what are some terrible project names you’ve worked on?
We just do an endless stream of acronyms.
And it doesn’t take long til everyone ignores them (except the VP who came up with it and the loyal sidekick who hasn’t gotten to put on her cheerleader outfit since high school, and she’s SO sooooper excited!!!).
And I often ask a room full of coworkers “So we’ve given up on QYGLY and are now implementing SNYGLY… anyone here know what those stand for?” It’s kind of fun to watch them bend their brains… “Well, Quigley was a Quality something something, and Snigley is a Service something something Group something… YOU! I’m pretty sure about the YOU part…”
I said to one guy struggling with the dozens of hours involved, “Y’know, by the time we figure out what it stands for, they’ll have chucked it and moved on to a new acronym, so I figure if we can delay doing our SNYGLY paperwork for a month, we’ll never have to do it.”
And that’s been true… for over twenty years. I’ve avoided probably thirty “initiatives”.
The company I work for named a certain project “Archangel” which made us more religious workers kind of giggle. In a general sense in scripture any time the Archangel visits the earth, someone gets pregnant or someone gets dead; either way you are screwed. 
Where I worked, we had a project codenamed “Bohica”. Everyone figured it was some exotic Spanish palm tree or something; in reality it stood for “Bend Over; Here It Comes Again”. 
I once jokingly named one of my husband’s projects “Operation Barn Door” (as in shutting it after the horses are out) after he described it to me. I was amused later to hear that when he told some coworkers they began referring to it that way.
In my first programming job out of college, we had a application programming interface manual for the operating system. Not only was the manual horribly named, but it was horribly designed. The function calls were alphabetized, rather than grouped by functionality, and the books were so thick, they had to be split into two volumes. So, “GetDateTime” was in volume 1, and “SetDateTime” was in volume 2. Plus, the data structures that needed to be filled out for each request and the data structures that were received after each request were in another set of volumes; again, alphabetized, rather than grouped by function. So, the request structure for “GetDateTime” was in volume 3, and the one for “SetDateTime” was in volume 4.
All of the function calls/requests were that way: Gets and Sets galore, with a smattering of other names tossed in for good measure. So, any time you were working on a particular set of functionality, you would have to have all four notebooks open on your desk to be able to make any headway.
And the name of the set of notebooks?
Why, it was the “System Programming Interface Reference Manual”, but it was known most commonly by its acronym.
Hey, Tom … I see you have the SPIRM spread all over your desk!
Just finished one that was referred to universally as the POS Project.
Those were the actual initials of the project title and almost no one made the connection and said, “Maybe we should call it something else…”
Back when I was in tech research, our group was called the “Analytics” group. The IT guy, who had a keen sense of humor, named all our group email accounts with the suffix -anal.
I worked with a guy who claimed he was one meeting away from naming it the Financial Accounts Receivable Tracking System.
Regards,
Shodan
A fellow racer named his team the Family Affair Racing Team.
We used to try and sneak in bad project names but one that was seriously used was the Short Haul Intercity Transport. But they merged short and haul into project SIT.
And we regularly proposed that projects were a natural for one of our academic partners - Sam Huston Institute of technology.
Another real one from the early 1970s when cities were trying to find programs for minority youths was SNYC, the School/Neighborhood Youth Corp. They sent high school students to shadow for a week. Everyone called the kinds “snicks” which was damn close to “spics”. The program managers desperately tried to explain it was pronounced “snike” which wasn’t a whole lot better. The program died after a year.
Dennis
Out here in Seattle a few years ago the city decided to build a brand new electric streetcar system going roughly from the southern end of Lake Union into, I think, downtown Seattle. They proudly named this the “South Lake Union Trolley”.
Guess how many nanoseconds elapsed between announcing the name and the first appearance of teeshirts with “I rode the SLUT” emblazoned thereon. The name got changed real fast. Our city council has NO sense of humor.
My BIL acted fast and got me a shirt!
I was working for a company that was about to introduce their product into Australia. Like most of their projects, the details were supposed be secret, and the project was given a code name to make sure that if any outsider heard the name, they wouldn’t know what the project was about. Problem is, in this case some genius decided the code name should be “Syndey”.
At the time, I mentioned to some coworkers the story of the German project Wotan in WWII, whose exceptionally poor code name gave British researchers the clues they needed to understand how the system worked.
I once worked on a project that was super confidential, and I couldn’t talk about it to anyone. It was a bottomless pit. Originally, it was supposed to take me a few months to complete by myself (timeline established by attorneys!), and eventually it expanded to two entire teams of company programmers and another team of outside consultants. It was near completion (after two years) when management threw a semi-related but different project on top of it. That part as not confidential, so my co-workers who were so curious about what I was working on for so long thought that that *was *the project.
Those of us working on it called it the Project from Hell. Indeed. In a two year stretch, I worked 6 or 7 day weeks, 10 hour days, with only one week off (to attend a wedding in Hawaii that I’d purchased non-refundable tix for).
Of course, there is always Dilbert’s TTP project, which stands for The TTP Project.
“Zekiah.” It wasn’t an acronym for anything. The idiot exec who came up with it thought it was a bible name and pompously declared that the Lord had suggested it to him. Spoiler alert: It’s not in the bible. And I’m pretty sure the Lord doesn’t spend his time suggesting names for failing DoD research projects.
Exec also wasn’t from around here. Zekiah does have meaning in this area. It’s a swamp near the headwaters of the Potomac, which we all learned about as the place where John Wilkes Booth hid out after killing President Lincoln.
I exacted my revenge for his numerous stupidities by declaring it brilliant and insisting he explain and get credit for it from everyone involved in the project. 
Anytime we have a Paper Exercise Not Involving Soldiers we get a lot of giggles.
The small government agency I work at allowed the staff to propose and vote on names for the new organization-wide tracking system intended to monitor various deliverables.
This was before the “Boaty McBoatface” incident taught the Internet not to do this sort of thing.
Perhaps predictably, the winner was the Commitment Handling and Organization System (CHAOS).
Some years back, a department purchased budgeting software from another state’s similar department, and attempted to modify it to fit our state’s needs (not a great plan to start with, but that’s not part of the story).
The software came with a perfectly good name. The department (call it the XYZ Department) renamed it “XYZbud”. Personally, I think that’s what they were smoking when they came up with the name - or possibly when they came up with the plan.
Years ago, my principal called me, our school tech guy, and a few other teachers into her office. She told us about “SWAT”—Students Who Assist Teachers—a program at a nearby school to keep the school computer network up and running. She had a similar idea, but what if it were Teachers who assisted teachers?
The tech guy and I looked at each other. To this day I don’t know how we kept it together.