The Acronym Mill

Are you failing to rake in the respect, admiration and monetary recompense that are consistent with your advanced level of project management expertise? If so, you need your own business or management model, complete with its own slick-sounding acronym, in order to truly set you apart and make you stand out in a crowd of (otherwise) management equals.
    This is easier than it looks. For example, someone can, say, set up a traditional Responsibility/Accountability Matrix (RAM), deconstruct them into detailed instructions with lot's of fuzzy terms like "strategic," "engage" and "implement", slap an acronym on it--like RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed)--and voila! They've developed their very own management model.
    I love reading the synopses in the management course catalogues I get in the mail (yeah, I know, I need to get out more). You can almost track the entire debate among the Agile management practitioners, the Scrum advocates and the more traditional Waterfall Model believers just by reading what the instructors or paper presenters believe they are bringing to the table.
    I know: I'm inviting a truckload of comments questioning my intelligence. But Agile management strikes me as little more than the practice of loosening up baseline change control parameters to the point of almost begging scope creep to hit your software project in a bid to acquire the kind of managerial latitude needed to deliver software faster. Throw in some trendy tactics, like re-arranging the desks in the office and bring along the ever-present admonition to achieve better communications (especially with stakeholders), and then you can profoundly influence the conversation on management theory around the globe.
    I first became aware of the practice of deconstructing already-existing management practices and trotting them back onstage re-packaged during the 1980s, when "Activity Based Costing" was suddenly a hot topic. For you gen-exers out there, Activity-Based Costing (note how easily the acronym falls off the tongue: ABC) was the idea that a project's basis of estimate should be created at the lowest level of the Work Breakdown Structure, or activity level, and "rolled up" to total project cost. Problem was, this was the way that valid estimates had been created since the dawn of project management. Besides, what's the alternative? Estimating based on the availability of the organization's resources? For manufacturing, process or asset management, that might be a workable approach, but it was never so in the realm of project manager. Nevertheless, a plethora of ABC-themed paper presentations' titles started appearing in project management and cost engineering seminars. True to form, of the ones I attended, the content was made up of deconstructing the act of generating the basis of estimate into some sort of process guide--almost like a recipe--and then sprinkling in vague but trendy management-speak terms to make it appear new, or more sophisticated.
    To engage in a bit of deconstruction myself, at the end of the day all management models are nothing more than formulaic attempts at telling other people how they should be managing their projects. I can see why such models are appealing to consultants. But, for the rest of us, do they really merit all of the books, articles and presentations devoted to them?