Thursday, April 7, 2011

Defined - Technical Strategery

Strategery
From Unwords.com http://www.unwords.com/unword/strategery.html

(n.) To defeat an enemy through the use of a large amount of bombs, munitions, or other explosives or projectiles.

Origins: From strategy or strategic and trajectory. Originally used in a Saturday Night Live comedy show skit to make fun of President Bush's less than stellar abilities to pronounce words.

From Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategery

a term of art among them [Bush White House staff] meaning oversight of any activity by president Bush's political consultants.

Technical Strategery
The oversight of any description by management of technical concepts or projects, by engineers to prevent the misrepresentation of said concepts or projects.

Technical strategery may be employed to prevent any of the following situations:
  • Misrepresentation of key technical concepts by non-technical persons to broader audiences
  • Creation and use of imaginative, but often non-existent, technical acronyms or terms by management
  • Failure to level-set customer expectations with realistic outcomes, deliverables, and timelines
  • The promise of unachievable services, features, or outcomes by management
  • Improper alignment of resources for project development or implementation
  • Failure to understand "what" technical staff day to day responsibilities entail by management
  • Solution design that does not meet business or customer requirements
  • Scope creep or direction change of existing technical projects that require complete solution re-design (often due to shiny new consumer tech adoption by C-Level execs; knows as the i-Device phenomenon)
  • Selective listening by non-technical persons when too many acronyms or technical concepts are presented (also know as "dumbing-down the presentation")
  • Misunderstanding of required versus optional technical components
  • Expense reduction through removal of required technical components
Note - the inverse of Technical Strategery is known as Technical Bewilderment.

Cheers,
Andrew

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