Michel and Els brought it up. So many people in IT use words they hardly understand and when they do they don’t take the time to explain the basics.
TMN: stands for This Means Nothing. I use it in meetings where people use 3 letter words all the time and I have the feeling not everyone understands them.
When I get that feeling I say something like.
“I agree with you, but did you think about TMN? “
A lot of people just continue without loosing a beat, yes, that is not a problem because ….
After a little discussion I ask them what TMN means. When I explain it, they get my point.
In other meetings I will just bluntly say I don’t understand this or that acronym, even if I know it but suspect others don’t. In a lot of meetings I get different answers from different persons. Usually when they agree what the 3 letter word means, the other discussions are over.
I don’t mind making a fool of myself if that means I save the face from someone else. In my experience, TMN works better because people realize more there is a problem with using acronyms without explaining them.
That is why on the projects I coach, I ask to make a list of all the abbreviations. It gives a lot of discussions at the beginning of the project, but it saves a lot of anger afterwards.
I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training company .net
Filed under: Uncategorized
You know anymore classic ICT acronyms?
Most people don’t ask an explanation I guess. It happens to me all the time at school. If I say: “who doesn’t understand X or Z”, almost nobody will answer. I always pick someone to check if they do know the answer. At least 80% of the time, they aren’t able to answer my question.
I’m not sure we do have to understand everything all the time. Maybe that’s something we learned as well?
I agree that asking do yiu understand does not work. Especially not in a demanding environment like work or school. (With peer pressure etc)
When I teached .net classes I asked tons of questions.
Before I started a topic I asked who can explain me this or that. And I made it fun to answer, that is I gave a small reward (a package of post it’s) to the first answer.
Interesting question, “do we need to know everything?” As a teacher I do not need to know everything.
But when people discuss in a corporate environment, claiming to be the expert, when they actually don’t understand an acronym, I think that is wrong.
They might still be the expert. And they don’t need to know every abbreviation. But if they claim they do….
A lot of IT people can’t say the words “I don’t know”
and that is a problem.
Something most of us learned at school.
@ Els I invented this one.
I will try to put some more on my blog the next weeks
family time now
[...] you like acronyms like GTT & GTO, check out my post on acronyms I am Yves Hanoulle, your virtual Project Coach and you can reach me @ Yves at my agile training [...]
@Els, @all it might be easier if you just ask me about a three letter acronyms. I will answer what I know (or ask my readrs to help me out)
[...] ampersands & abbreviations, [...]