Do the projects you manage have a name?

Dear Luis,

I think the naming of projects comes from the Military where specific operations where given names like Operation Overlord for the D-Day landing in France. This tradition has migrated to project management and specifically the large budgets that the Military have to spend and the private sector helping them to spend it. Normally before a project gets approval it is given a working title (a bit like a movie script/title) and this name may change when given approval and a start date. For me the naming nomenclature for projects comes from a mixture of what the project is about, what can easily be remembered, will the name be used for marketing purposes and what name has not been used before. Sometimes for secrecy issues the name maybe completely different to the objectives of the project.

Daire

Dear Deven
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion

Interesting what you wrote: "It's always a good idea to name the projects in order to define the scope and boundary for the projects and also to generate confidence in the minds of the stakeholders for the project"

In this exercise of creating the name, can you mention and at the same time limit the scope of the project?

Ahmad,

The set of rules; short, meaningful, unique, clear of confusion.
What do you qualify has easy for searching in DMS?

Dear Luis,

I think the naming of projects comes from the Military where specific operations where given names like Operation Overlord for the D-Day landing in France. This tradition has migrated to project management and specifically the large budgets that the Military have to spend and the private sector helping them to spend it. Normally before a project gets approval it is given a working title (a bit like a movie script/title) and this name may change when given approval and a start date. For me the naming nomenclature for projects comes from a mixture of what the project is about, what can easily be remembered, will the name be used for marketing purposes and what name has not been used before. Sometimes for secrecy issues the name maybe completely different to the objectives of the project.

Daire

One of the very first projects I worked on after graduating was creating a student report generator for a university. The project sponsor called it "My Students" - I guess being a Graduate Chair and her attachment to students she called that. I would have called it Student Report Generator since it generated information only related to Students and not their course information or their pre-requisites or their parent relationship with the university or the alumni funding or anything else. The name should explain the purpose of the project in my opinion. Of course sometimes you have to settle for arbitrary names.

Hi Luis,

Indeed.
One of the reasons is that there is no second chance at getting an impactful first impression!

Naming projects is something I’ve always enjoyed, as you can make it a competition with the team and/or stakeholders. Most of my projects end up with a 3 or 4 word name which then gets acronymized.

The problem is that after many years, you have countless projects/products which have similar acronyms. So, after my current boss misstated “like sounding acronyms” to upper management, he declared to me: “You are banned from naming any more projects/products,” so now I have to use a proxy to get my names into the pot. :)