>Ever since I joined the team of a worldwide company active in IT-telecommunication, my work related universe has completely changed. Nowadays I don’t talk about communication campaigns, online tools, branding, PR, Google Analytics or CRM. My work jargon has been completely replaced by a brand-new series of concepts. Of course, I still talk about project management, communication, planning, action plans, milestones, budgets and follow-up, but all from a different perspective.
As I am still a new acquisition or a new hire, I am still able to see the differences between my colleagues that have been baptized with the corporate culture and who can’t see that there can be other ways of defining and approaching things or simply expressing himself.
Below I will present some items of my new jargon (that personally I found it funny).
- “PTO”: Mark told to me that he was supposed to be on PTO this week. What on earth is PTO? You’ll laugh. It is just – Personal Time Off. I wonder what happened to “leave” or “holiday”. I suppose it’s more fancy to say PTO, like a some type of special activity that only some people are allowed to do. The worst part is that people don’t even realize that in a normal English, you wouldn’t actually use – personal time off.
- “Site visits”: Having an online communication background, “site” for me means “website”. And site visits means nothing else than “website visits” – the number of people visiting your website on a certain period of time. Obviously, in my new job, these meanings are completely different. A site visit, here, means an occasion when the engineer goes to a certain office (called site) and does some IT works. As some offices can be located even on a different continent, a “site visit” is a really big thing. That means travelling (even up to 14 hours by airplane), more costs, hotels, preparing everything beforehand by collaborating with people whose culture can be entirely opposite than yours and so on. Plus when there is a “site visit”, it only happens after the business hours and can last as much as the business hours or even more. Therefore it’s not much sleep and it’s extraordinary.
- “Cutover”. I did not have any equivalent of this term before, so I just embraced it as it is. What does it mean? Just “ Implementation”, it is basically all the duration of work which happens out of business hours and at the site of the office.
- “Deploy”: This verb, to deploy, to me it sounds either extremely formal or extremely military related. It sounds like – “we will deploy our troops on the X territory”. But at work, “deploy” is used not only in the written communication, but also in the spoken one. “What are you working on now? Ooh, just on a polycom deployment”. Well, if somebody tells you that, I don’t know if you’ll understand much. However, it means – “I’m working on a conference phones upgrading project. I need to upgrade the conference phones at a series of sites”.
- “Polycom”, as you realized above, it means conference phone. So, it is poly-communicative or multi-purposed phone.
- “CR”: If somebody needs to submit a CR, it means that he/she needs to submit a “change request”. However, this change request is not like the one from project management, where you actually modify the scope of the project and it’s impacting the budget, the quality and the time. No, in this case, it means the fact that the engineer is authorized to do some IT changes in a certain perimeter. Very comprehensive, don’t you think?
- “PIT”: If somebody says that he is a PIT PM, it means that he is a Project Manager managing IT projects. (PIT = Project IT)
- “PRINCE2” – Projects In Controlled Environments
And the list could continue, but I think it’s enough for now. Otherwise you’ll start to mumble also that you’ll be on PTO soon , that at the moment you’re working as a PIT PM and that you’ve got a fleet implementation project and a polycom deployment which includes 5 site visits. All the CR was submitted and that this weekend you’ll have the cutover. Fortunately the call manager has been already upgraded.
Later edit: Well, despite the coded language, people seem to have fun here. Check this post and video (see below) for instance.
Gabriela D. Spencer 