Reading Gianna Clark’s latest blogmade me thing about all the “sayisms” that I’ve developed over the past three years of my Lean-Six Sigma journey. I have added lots of acronyms, sayings, and jargon in my daily speech – and I keep forgetting that not everybody is familiar with these terms (yet) – including my husband during our dinner table conversations! Have you had this same experience?

Here are some examples of what I find myself saying – in each case, someone has said – “Whoa – slow down – I don’t know what you mean by that!”

• Radio station WIIFM (thanks Gina, that’s what kicked me off on this blog! “What’s in it for me?”)
• CTQs (Critical to Quality [characteristics])
• VOC (Voice of the Customer)
• ARMI (Approvers, Resources, Members, Interested Parties)
• Big Y (Process Outcome)
• WWW (What-Who-When)
• DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control)
• FMEA (Failure Modes Effects Analysis)
• DOE (Design of Experiments)
• SOP (Standard Operating Procedure)
• DPMO (Defects per Million Opportunities)
• SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, Customers)
• VSM (Value Stream Map)
• COPQ (Cost of Poor Quality)
• GR&R (Gage Reproducibility & Repeatability)
• QFD (Quality Function Deployment)

Surely there must be many more out there that you get caught on as well. Care to share?