In the engineering scene, the one word that always gets my juice is feasibility.

It sounds so fake, like an instant diploma from Recto, and amateurish like a thesis for sale alongside rush passport ID's and notary public.

The way it is pronounced is never poetry but a gnash one makes out of swallowing green putty found in your armpit (thanks, Douglas Adams).

Now some don't get it and say pee see bee lee tee. Piss off.

I prefer "make versus buy" which adds a tone of justification in it. I like the challenge of arguments in the boardroom, and branding "old school/resistant to change" to deputies and herd them like cattle on gaslift chairs back to their cubicles.

Ok, not everybody could get make versus buy, and one can escape with "business case" or "biz case" but please put SWOT analysis in the right context. It doesn't place an iota of business acumen on your head anyway.

I checked out the thesaurus for some fee see bee lee tee alternatives and found:

viability--musical and hints of life, dams and highways

possibility--too common, and is homophonic with the f word too, but I can have this anytime

probability--too statistical, it should be OK but not during presentations involving chunks of (pseudo) data as it could be the source of confusion. Talking, I mean, technical heads have the attention span of an antimatter (it was thought to exist but not yet proven).

likelihood--very country, but could serve the purpose. No bling to it though.

practicability--a mouthful, but wait till you hear...

achievability--just one of the terms we engineers, ugh, generated, alongside calendarize, doable, and productize.

Other choices include potential and acceptability, especially if I am talking about market segment share and product life cycles. Engineers are, after the profit after all.

Fee see bee lee tee. Look at it, it's up there with see fee lees. Or should I say down.

This entry was posted by sky, on Monday, November 21, 2005. You can leave your response.