What's in a name?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet..."
or apparently not.

The place I'm working at the moment likes having codenames for projects. Products gets themes and each constituent project, and its associated budget, gets a codename within the theme. The theme of one particular product is kid's action toys, and the "inner geek" is particularly satiated "researching" the latest super-zapper and turbo-whacker toys for potential project names.

So it came to pass that this product moved from active development to a maintenance phase and a project name for the maintenance budget was decided to be "Megarobot" or thereabouts (the whole point of codenames is that they're secret so names have been altered very slightly to defeat Google and protect my NDA)

The budget estimate was small - about half a man-day per week, and all was well for a week or so but then about two man-weeks of extra testing that had been forgotten about was added to the project and it temporarily went massively overspent.

Then something fascinating happened: the finance director got involved and she didn't seem to get the "Megarobot" joke for a tiny little maintenance project. She was desperately concerned that this project was out of control and its costs were spiralling; she insisted that she sign-off on each individual item of work for this project even though she doesn't normally look anything under £100k expenditure. It seemed that the name had freaked her out: this was a nasty monster of a project that was out of control, rather than a very small but rather lumpy project.

Next time we'll call it "pipsqueak" or "littlebrother" or something.