I once worked on a customer project where the outgoing IT Director (for whom this was to be his swansong) wanted the project to be named Cuba (a rival organisation’s project was Havana so this had to be bigger – what’s bigger than the city… the whole island!). This was later given an associated acronym of Common User Based Architecture – it was basically their Year 2000 desktop and server upgrade project – but we knew it the S**** H****** Information Technology Experience (where SH was the IT Director’s initials). Then a few weeks back, I was working with a guy who turned out to be working on the same customer account at the same time but for a competitor, who apparently referred to Project Cuba as Can’t Upgrade Bugger All!

Another colleague recalled some similarly dubious acronyms – he once had to support a system called Customer Requests And Problems and a common term used in one of his previous organisations was Failed Under Continuous Testing.

I’d love to hear from anybody else with poorly named projects/products – leave a comment on this post if you have some you’d like to share!