Intel-speak during out-of-office hours

There is no denying that the corporate work culture has a big impact on our off-office life. For example, if you are a SW development manager by profession, you automatically tend to map many of the things learnt in the office on to normal house activities - ‘Lets put a detailed requirements list for the the new entertainment unit we are going to buy this weekend”, “Hmm…this seems too risky. We need to think of the mitigation plans now before going on with this!”. If your partner is not from IT background, God help you!

How many times have we checked ourselves after looking at the blank / quizzical stares from others?! It has happened more than once in my case! Today, during lunch time, I decided to watch out for Intel lingo that people use. Kinda funny to notice so many of the corporate terms becoming a part of our day-to-day vocabulary.

Most of these are not necessarily Intel-specific, but they are heavily used inside Intel. Also, Intel is famous for lots of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms - an acronym for representing acronyms - how about that!!], I have listed only a few of them!

Do share such lingo that you guys use in your companies. Lemme see if I can popularize some of them inside Intel

Word / Expression	Inside Intel meaning	Context I heard this in  off-office talk
POR	Plan of Record. Some feature that is approved and will be in place for the current version / product revision.	“Going to Coorg this weekend was not a POR at all. But, we pulled that in somehow”
ZBB	Zero-based-budgeting. If some feature is ZBBd, it means it wont be implemented or no money/effort will be spent on it. Only POR features / products go ahead.	“I told her to ZBB the Coorg trip. It is too hard to accommodate at this late an hour”
Ping	Contacting someone via IM / Phone or Email.	“Ok, I am leaving now…ping me tomorrow. We will plan for the movie”
iMBO	Intel Management By Objective. Set of agreed upon goals / results, usually tracked on a quarterly basis.	“One of the IMBOs for my carpenter is to re-do the hall stuff”. [He used it in a light sense, but it was clear he couldn’t think of any other proper way of explaining it. ]
AR	Action Required. A small task that has to be done, usually in a week or so. You get these in meetings a lot	“Don’t worry…I will take an AR to arrange for the movie tickets tomorrow”
Take this offline	Discuss / Pursue something later, probably because it is of lesser importance or not aligning with the agenda. Normally used in meetings, when trivial things come up.	On phone, to someone: “Hmm…I don’t think we need to find a closure for this now. Lets take this offline”
Rat hole	Discussing / Debating a topic too much, than normally needed, with out any solid conclusion in sight.	“Let’s decide on the movie tomorrow evening, based on the availability. Else, we will be unnecessarily rat holing now.”
Hard stop	Stop immediately. Cannot be delayed beyond some time. Normally used to convey the importance of the next event. Used like “Guys, I have a hard stop at 0400pm. I have another meeting that I need to prepare.”	On phone, to some college friend: “6′o clock? Oh no….I have a hard stop at 0630. How about meeting after 0900 today?”
Raise the bar	Increase the expectation. Normally, the bar gets raised every time you meet the current expectations set by your superior.	On phone, talking about a carpenter: “We need to raise the bar for him, else he won’t even do what he did last time around”
EOD	End of Day.	“Ping me by EOD tomorrow. Ok?”
Keep me in synch / keep me in loop	Providing updates regularly on each step.	“Ok, let’s meet tomorrow evening. Keep me in loop on any last min changes”
Bandwidth	Difficult to explain. Think of it this way - if you have more bandwidth, you can do more work / something else	On phone, to his house association president: “I understand your point, but you need to understand that I don’t have the bandwidth now to go talk to the builder. I am stuck in some official work.” [it’s a different story that he was sitting with me in the cafetaria for more than 2 hrs with out doing anything ]
Setup the Agenda	List of points to discuss / close on. Typically you setup an agenda for the meeting you setup.	“His agenda was not clear at all…I couldn’t understand it till the end” [Used loosely as a substitute for “hidden motive”]
Workweek / Quarter	In the corporate world, your year is split in to 52 workweeks or 4 quarters. After sometime, you forget that there is something called “months”.	On phone, to an ICICI person: “Could you send me this month’s statement by next week? It should be….hmmmm [ a small pause when he checks his calender that is attached to the tag]….WW33″