i was discussing with a fellow, highly twisted and equally cynical co-worker one of the many personal challenges i've set upon myself, coming up with the worst project names.
Most projects, for whatever reason, refuse to have reasonable, rational names. Instead of something like "Feature Add - Phase II" or "Redesign the UI" folks inevitably wax romantic and long for names that herald much more. So you get things like "Project Storm Hammer" or "Project Acropolis". i suppose that having some heralding name that speaks of something far older and more important than "change the banner to be blue" does make some folks a tad more willing to get up in the morning, but for me, getting to work on "Project Sheboygan" lacks a great deal of the same draw.
This, of course, means that i therefore have a golden opportunity to just screw with people.
yeah, no way i can let that one go.
So, i like to come up with the worst possible project names right from the get-go. That's not as easy as it sounds because inevitably, i have to sell it to a bunch of folks. So calling something "Project Dismal Failure" just won't pass the nod test. No, instead, i have to dig for the cryptic and semi-arcane. Possibly, i may need to pick a name based on a theme as well as an approach.
Let's show an example, shall we? Let's say we're working on a set of projects with city names and the latest one has a highly questionable release date. "Project Philadelphia" (mostly for the effects on the crew). Likewise, say you've got projects named after various mountains, the amateur would probably pick "Helens","Pinatubo" or "Krakatoa", but the artisan would pick "Tambora" (which not only killed 92,000 people and plunged the planet into a "year without summer" resulting in snow in July in New England, but is far less well known by the folks sitting around the table with you.)
My current favorite is a project i'm currently working on called Project Bikini, named for the Bikini Atoll, which in 1954 we blew straight to hell. Sometime later, the once previous residents of the Atoll discovered lawyers and the US was forced to scrape the Atoll clean, resupply it with new, non-radioactive sand, restock the plants and do something about the massive blue hole they formed. Cleanup and recovery continues today, fifty years later. It was a huge, ugly mess that produced more grief than benefit and which has serious repercussions to today.
The precursor project is named "Speedo" which i can take no credit for.
My cohort managed to get a project named "Iceberg" since only 10% of what was being worked on was visible. Oh yeah, and there's a sizable risk that the project might also sink that group into the icy waters without so much as a signal flare.
So, have you managed to get a project named something less than romantic without anyone else noticing?
Well, in my former company I was known for coming up with crazy names and acronyms.
My personal highlight back then was the insufferable time tracking app I had to build for all of the company, because if the creative and geeky folks love one thing, it's keeping track of the time they've spent on every penstroke. Yessir.
Anyways, at some point I had to name it. The company name started with an "S", the German word for "Helpful" is "Hilfreich", and the application was for Time Tracking, so I took the liberty of shortening the whole name ("S.' Hilfreicher Time Tracker") to "SHiTT".
That name was actually, really, officially used for ~2 years.
We're trying to come up with a project name right now. You've certainly got me thinking.
The last project I named was "Zork", a billing system that never launched. Another big one at a previous project was the "Temporary Cataloging Tool" I wrote. TCT was supposed to live for three or four months until a new system made it obsolete. Of course, it was in use when I left the company and survived for around 2.5 years.
I'm told that a project to create a network security product at a major network security company got code named Maginot by engineers after the executives decided it was a good idea without consulting them first.
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That's great - partially because I had a Project Castle Bravo (shorted to Bravo) back at my former employer.
"The yield of 15 megatons was two and a half times what was expected. The cause of the high yield was a laboratory error made by designers of the device"