Deciphering IT corporate-speak

I was senior IT manager at a large health-care organization when the vice president of applications management asked me to create a centralized quality assurance department. At that point, our IT organization consisted of close to 1,500 staffers scattered over eight states, but quality assurance was still being done on a project-by-project basis. Centralizing this operation would bring us badly needed consistency, and (I hoped) would improve customer satisfaction.

I was looking forward to the challenge. The VP assured me that the new QA department had the support of executive management. Besides, our IT mission statement explicitly celebrated individuals who were willing to accept risk in the interest of higher accomplishment. I was in.

My first problem was finding IT people who knew something about quality assurance. At the time, our CIO was under the influence of the book Good to Great, and no one was getting on the bus unless someone got off. So my pool of potential resources was restricted to in-house (read: relatively inexperienced) candidates. In addition, I was expected to fund the operation by conning various project directors into transferring to me any portions of their budgets normally earmarked for quality assurance and testing.

Even so, we achieved impressive results: In less than two years, the new organization was supporting more than 150 ongoing projects. Staff grew to 300-plus, mostly through domestic and offshore contractors. We negotiated an enterprise license agreement for software that saved the company $1 million over five years, demonstrated nearly $6 million in cost avoidance, and achieved zero production outages for projects that went through our new processes.

I was pleased. The VP was not. Late in the second year, he told me that “we need to take it to the next level.” I asked him what that meant, but all I got was motivational business babble. The VP couldn’t define what the next level looked like, but he knew that we needed to be there.

Two months later, the VP brought in a new QA director, and I was reduced to overseeing quality assurance consultants. Within three months, the VP himself was reassigned to oversee another department, and his new QA director was demoted. I guess the next level was eluding him, too.

The VP’s replacement went into panic mode and began making “next-level” changes. His first move was to change the department’s name; it only dawned on him after he sent out the announcement that the new acronym could be pronounced “squat.” In short order, the department had a new-new name. Not long after that, the VP decided to eliminate the renamed QA department altogether.

More than 40 of us were given a 90-day notice, which meant we had 90 days with pay to find new positions in the company before being put out on the street. HR expected severance payouts to be minimal, because there were so many open positions. But many of us decided that 90 days paid vacation, followed by a generous severance package, beat working for the new VP. Ironically, one month after the layoff, the new VP “decided to pursue other opportunities outside the organization.”

Word is, he was fired. Either that, or he’d found the next level.