Act like one, so speak like one ~ Deloitte Consulting Forum

Frankly, my personal favorites are the words we just make up. This weeks entry: Operationalize.

As in: In order to operationalize this model, we will need to leverage resources from several of the key workstreams.

and then some people in the room look at the word, underlined in red in the powerpoint deck and ask "is that spelled correctly? it looks correct"

-- that being said. I kind of like a lot of our consulting jargon. I struggle sometimes because I try to think of other things to say, but I really prefer saying to a client "this exercise is designed to go after the low hanging fruit, then we will move on to the long-term strategic shift"

because in my head, I can't find another way to nicely say "this exercise is designed to find and fix all the stupid crap you currently do, then we will move on to the long-term strategic changes that will prevent you from doing the same stupid crap in the future"

Principal Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 163

Here's one I just made up:

Recontextualize

This deck doesn't make sense; you need to go back and recontextualize the date.

Principal Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 164

You can turn anything into a verb by adding "ize." That does come in handy. Here's another one.

"Parameterize"

As part of our best practice methodology, our statistical models rely on parameterization of the input variables. This parameterization enables risk sensitivity analysis to be performed.

I swear i never used the word "Perspective" before, now its all about "From the delivery perspective", "client perspective", "technology perspective".. You could pretty much take any word and add a "perspective" to it and viola... its consutant speak. Now even my client has started using the word. Rolling Eyes

Another favourite is "spinning the wheels". lets not spin our wheels here.....

Consultant Joined: 01 Jun 2005 Posts: 12

One time I had a manager say in front of a client that we needed to "uniquify" the process.

I started laughing which totally blew his credibility... my bad. Embarassed

Speaking of making things up, I like to make my own consultanese. For instance, I use the car term "downshift" with my team when I want to convey the sense that we need to act with urgency, to be decisive, and to stop churning.

Likewise, I'll use "cruise in 6th" to let the team know that they should continue with their current pace and progress.

I made certain, of course, that the team members were proficient with driving manual tranny cars before using such terms.

Principal Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 163

Manager Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 64

You know, it's funny. We use to personify technology and use people terms to refer to it, e.g. 'she's a good girl, always runs fast enough to get me whatever I need'. Now we computerize people and use technology terms to refer to them, e.g. this whole thread. So why are computers now humans and humans now computers?

Principal Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 164

Because computers are easier to understand than humans (at least for people who use words like bandwidth when talking about humans).

Manager Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 51

For all you consultanese fans, today's Dilbert perfectly captures this thread... in fact it almost makes me believe Scott Adams is on GDL...

Principal Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 164

I couldn't make this stuff up:

Manager Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 64

Holy cow... Usually it makes sense but it just sounds stupid; I'm not sure we can even consider that particular example proper English.

Manager Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 49

slightly off-topic and don't mean to hijack the thread but I thought this TR article particularly fitting in response to:

Manager Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 49

Let's not forget the web-economy bullshit generator, still quite useful in this day and age:

http://dack.com/web/bullshit.html

Analyst Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 3