Lessons in WOBB part one: Introduction to Acronyms

If you want to start a WOBB culture within any company you will have to start with using common WOBB acronyms, once you have mastered these, and made them common language you can progress on to the next level: making up your own.

Now it's tempting to jump ahead and start creating your own, but this is not good practise. You see, you might actually come up with a new valid acronym... not good, better to have good working knowledge of all the existing ones, and then recycle them for your own (obviously much more valid) use of the same letters. This way you can claim to be recycling, thereby assisting in the achievement of the SHE departments environmental targets, and your own personal MITP target* (if you ask which target then you're a rookie, but OK: the one about improving cross functional cooperation), thus increasing your bonus!

But I digress from the main subject, acronyms. The classic signs of emerging WOBB culture is when someone comes up with idea of creating a glossary containing all acronyms commonly used wihtin the company. Conformation of a WOBB culture is when this glossary appears on the company's intranet (extra points for a fully equiped search engine) and a site manager actually mentions this proudly in his anual pre-summer letter to all the employees...

Here some classic acronyms:

SOP - Standard Operating Procedure
SOI - Standard Operating Instructions
SHE - Safety Health & Environment
DDS - Demand Driven Supply
RFT - Right First Time
JIT - Just In Time
EPS - Earnings Per Share
CIP - Compliance Improvement Plan
E&E - Effectiveness & Efficiency

And some less classic but more WOBB ones:

ACT - Architecture Challenge Team
ECT - Effective Communication Technique
MITP - Management of Individual and Team Performance*
PDP - Personal Development Plan
EOP2 - End Of Phase 2 meeting

If you haven't got good gripps with the basics, grab your average anual report from any random major coorporation and open a business dictionary on the side, and start reading. With a bit of practise you can easily combine the top list into one single paragraph!

* A seperate lesson in WOBB will appear on this subject.