What IT Directors Mean In Business Speak

As a coach and committed Agile Evangelist, I spend most of my time convincing the software organization that they are actually part of the business. In this role, I also help with interpretations of Software / Technical jargon to business speak. Here are 5 of my favorite IT Director phrases:

1. We are going to make the date at all cost.
2. Refining requirements with business partners is bureaucratic and slow.
3. It is up to the Operational team to clean up the process.
4. We will work with DevOps to smooth out deployments.
5. This new technology will speed up delivery once we re-write everything.

Now drumroll please, here is what they mean to the rest of the business.

1. We are going to make the date at all cost. Actually means you need to have funding for 2 support people for every developer on staff. It will take one to three years to make this software run smoothly. At the end of the third year, we will make the case that it is too costly to maintain and try to make the date at all cost for a replacement.
   
   

2. Refining requirements with business partners is bureaucratic and slow. Actually means we in IT can write a bunch of code much faster if we don’t have to understand how you are going to use it. We will just give it to you and you can figure out how to change your processes to make it work. If you can’t make it work, we can start up a replacement project.
   
   

3. It is up to the Operational team to clean up the process. While delivering at all cost we created a bunch of manual steps, such as loading data directly to the production database. These manual steps will be turned over to technical operations with knowledge transfer sessions, i.e. someone sitting with someone but nothing actually written down. Once it is in the operational team, it is up to them to figure out how to automate these manual processes as long as they do not use development time.
   
   

4. We will work with DevOps to smooth out deployments. We were busy delivering at all cost and never got around to automating our deployments. We are turning over that piece of work to the Delivery Operations team to automate.   We don’t have time to document the deployment procedures but they have been working with us for the last few months so they can do it.
   
   

5. This new technology will speed up delivery once we re-write everything. Actually means, I found something new and cool that I want to learn and it will look good on my resume.   That old stuff is hard to maintain and change. We have no idea what most of that code is doing so let’s just start from scratch. We will not be able to make any business changes to the existing software. All of our efforts will be building the new software to do what the existing software already does.

Finally, the one that the IT Director says in the hallway but never in a meeting, “I have no idea what all these operational people are doing, I wish I could get that headcount for software delivery.”