What’s in a name? Avoiding the jargon monster.

October 11th, 2007 · No Comments · Agile Practices

It seems everywhere we look today in the world, there is a maze of jargon and buzzwords that can hinder the work we do. Today, my team doesn’t “have the bandwidth to work on our end-to-end scalable solution for our users”. What the heck does that mean? I think it’s manager-ese for saying that we don’t have enough people to do our work this week. We’re bombarded on a daily basis with this type of jargon that doesn’t do anything but make things sound more complicated than they really are.

Agile and Scrum are not immune from the jargon effect. Sprints. Retrospectives. Burndowns. Product Owners. ScrumMasters. We have plenty of words to throw around to sound impressive. The Scrum vocabulary may be useful in setting it apart from other agile practices (two more good buzzwords). It may even be useful in helping communicate abstract concepts (three more) using a common lexicon. However, we can’t get too hung up on the terminology we use. Sometimes, it seems that we get so wrapped up in using the “right” terminology, that we forget that deep down, it actually means something. That loss of meaning gets propagated (another good one) throughout our organizations, usually in the upward direction. The danger is that when we don’t speak in simple terms and resort to using jargon, people who do not truly understand the jargon use it incorrectly. This usually means our managers. Case in point: About 4 years ago I worked for a manager who had no clue about GIS or software development and we all knew it. To amuse ourselves, we’d make up acronyms and new “tech terms” that we made sure he overheard. Believe it or not, we’d hear him using our “tech terms” in management and team meetings. It made for good fun, but it’s actually a serious problem in organizations today.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you call your remaining work your product backlog, your task list, or that bunch of stuff we need to do…it doesn’t matter. At it’s heart, it’s still just a list of things you and your team need to complete. So make sure that if you’re going to use jargon, you know what it means. Better yet, try to avoid using jargon as much as possible and start speaking like a person. It might make things simpler for everyone.