Nothing funny about feldspar

I was looking at the Project Management Institute’s website, with the idle thought that I might try to get some credentials. This appeared in their “sample questions” pdf, as the background to a series of questions:

Company A and Company B merge to create a new organization, Company ABC. Both companies operated strategic business units and employed full-time project managers. Although both companies were composite matrix management organizations, their corporate and project management cultures and organizational structures differed. Company A’s project management organizations tailored their processes and tools to their assigned strategic business units; Company B’s project management organizations centralized the development of processes and tools for corporate-wide adoption. The new organization, Company ABC, retained the strategic business units, composite matrix management organization, and full- time project managers. It has a single project organization that aligns project managers with strategic units.

The whole site has this overblown use of pseudo-precise business-speak, starting with the PMI tagline: “Project Management Institute… Making project management indispensable for business results.™” and continuing with news about the new certification test:

PMI officially announces that it will deploy the updated PMP credential examination (referred to as the “2005 Examination” for purposes of this communication) globally at 14.00 GMT on 30 September 2005. Five days prior, a “black-out” period (beginning on 25 September 2005) will commence during which the PMP credential examination will be unavailable.

Can’t they just say “The old test will stop being used on September 25 2005. The new test will be available starting September 30 2005 at 14:00 GMT.”?

I appreciate the desire of the PMI to earn big bucks by creating an aura of rigor and ability about Professional Project Management (by creating a $500-or-so-a-pop test, etc), and it is obviously successful (150,000 members of PMI; 30,000 new PM certifications last year — and after all I was considering it). However, I can’t help but think that it’s all manufactured — filled with jargon and polysyllables to show that yes-indeedy, you have to speak our lingo to be a Real Project Manager™.

I used to be a project manager, but it appears I have been out of the country too long and no longer speak the language.