Grrrr.. I'm on a Tiger Team

Today’s B.S. Corporate Buzzword comes courtesy of NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, who said he has a Tiger Team working on solving the problem of foam insulation falling off during a launch.

Tiger Team was a military term for a team that would penetrate a supposedly secure installation, leaving behind harmless proof that they were there (such as signs or notes). The term is also used for testing the security of IT systems, but more frequently, and annoyingly, used to describe any team of experts working on a particular problem.

Maybe my main issue with the term is that in the past I worked with a small, evil consultant from Deloitte & Touche that responded to every question by saying that they had “a tiger team working on the problem”. In addition to that, it just sounds stupid.

Oooh... tigers. Big, lean, efficient, killing machines. Unfortunately, I know better, and it is much more likely that you would see:

Sloth Team: Do something, but do it very slowly
Lemming Team: Do what everyone else is doing
Howler Monkey Team: Sit there and scream about stuff
Platypus Team: Can’t quite figure out what they’re doing
Lamprey Team: Live off the success of others
Coelacanth Team: Produce something every 80,000,000 years