Management & Strategy Abbreviations
92 abbreviations · part of Business & Finance Abbreviations
Abbreviations from general management, corporate strategy, governance, operations, procurement and quality management, along with the deadline shorthand used in office email and chat. They appear in board papers, strategy decks, tender documents and team messages, and many come from named frameworks such as Six Sigma, lean manufacturing or the balanced scorecard. Entries explain what each term measures or describes, where it came from and how it differs from similar-looking terms.
| Abbreviation | Stands for | Description |
|---|---|---|
| AGM | Annual general meeting | Yearly meeting of a company's shareholders, or of a club's or association's members, at which directors present the accounts, members vote on resolutions and board… |
| AOB | Any other business | The final item on a meeting agenda, reserved for matters not listed elsewhere. |
| AOP | Annual operating plan | Detailed one-year plan that translates strategy into targets for revenue, expenses, headcount and capital spending, usually broken down by month and department. |
| BAU | Business as usual | Normal, ongoing operations of an organization, as opposed to projects, transformation programs or crisis responses. |
| BCP | Business continuity plan | Documented plan describing how an organization will keep critical operations running, or restore them quickly, during and after a disruption such as a fire… |
| BD | Business development | Work of creating long-term value for a company through new customers, partnerships, markets and deals, sitting between sales, strategy and corporate development. |
| BHAG | Big hairy audacious goal | Long-term, ambitious goal, typically ten to thirty years out, bold enough to galvanize an organization and clear enough to be understood without explanation. |
| BI | Business intelligence | Technologies and practices for collecting, integrating, analyzing and presenting business data so managers can make better decisions, typically through dashboards… |
| BoD | Board of directors | Elected body that oversees a corporation on behalf of shareholders: it appoints and supervises the CEO, approves strategy and major transactions, declares dividends and… |
| BPM | Business process management | Discipline of modeling, executing, monitoring and improving an organization's business processes, often supported by software that automates workflows. |
| BPO | Business process outsourcing | Contracting a specific business function, such as customer service, payroll, claims processing or accounting, to an outside provider, often in a lower-cost country. |
| BPR | Business process reengineering | Management approach that radically redesigns core business processes, rather than improving them incrementally, to achieve dramatic gains in cost, quality, speed or… |
| BRD | Business requirements document | Formal document describing what a business needs from a project or system, including objectives, scope, stakeholders and functional requirements, written before design… |
| BSC | Balanced scorecard | Performance management framework that tracks strategy across four perspectives: financial, customer, internal business processes, and learning and growth. |
| BU | Business unit | Semi-autonomous division of a company that runs a distinct product line, customer segment or region, often with its own management team, budget and profit-and-loss… |
| C-level | Chief level (executive rank) | Adjective describing executives at the top tier of a company, those holding chief officer titles, or the decisions and conversations involving them. |
| C-suite | Chief executive suite (senior executives with chief titles) | Collective term for a company's most senior executives, whose titles usually begin with "chief," such as CEO, CFO, COO and CTO. |
| CAPA | Corrective and preventive action | Quality-system process for investigating problems, fixing their root causes (corrective action) and stopping similar problems from occurring elsewhere (preventive… |
| CI | Continuous improvement | Ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes through many small, incremental changes rather than occasional large overhauls. |
| COB | Close of business | End of the working day, used as a deadline in business, legal and government correspondence and generally meaning about 5 p.m. local time on the stated day. |
| CoE | Center of excellence | Dedicated team that develops and shares expertise, standards and best practices in a specific area, such as analytics, automation or procurement, for the whole… |
| CSF | Critical success factor | Element an organization, project or strategy must get right in order to achieve its mission, such as securing a key supplier, retaining expert staff or hitting a launch… |
| CSR | Corporate social responsibility | Commitment by a company to operate ethically and contribute to society beyond legal requirements, through activities such as charitable giving, employee volunteering… |
| CTQ | Critical to quality | Measurable characteristic of a product or service that customers consider essential, such as delivery within 48 hours or a coating thickness within tolerance. |
| DMAIC | Define, measure, analyze, improve, control | Five-phase, data-driven improvement cycle at the heart of Six Sigma projects: define the problem and goals, measure current performance, analyze root causes, improve… |
| DPMO | Defects per million opportunities | Quality metric that counts defects relative to the number of chances for a defect to occur, scaled to one million. |
| DRI | Directly responsible individual | Single person who owns a project, decision or task and is accountable for its outcome, even when many people contribute. |
| EGM | Extraordinary general meeting | Shareholder meeting called between annual general meetings to deal with urgent or special business, such as approving a merger, changing the articles of association or… |
| ELT | Executive leadership team | Group of top executives, typically the CEO and the heads of major functions, who meet regularly to run the company and make cross-functional decisions. |
| EOB | End of business | Synonym for close of business, meaning the end of the working day, typically around 5 p.m. local time. |
| EOD | End of day | Deadline meaning by the close of the current working day, typically around 5 p.m. local time, though some people read it as midnight. |
| EOI | Expression of interest | Short submission in which a potential supplier, partner or buyer signals interest in an opportunity before a formal tender or sale process begins. |
| EOM | End of month | Last day or business day of the current month, used for deadlines, reporting cutoffs and payment terms. |
| EOW | End of week | Sets a deadline at the close of the working week, usually Friday afternoon. |
| EOY | End of year | Deadline or period meaning the close of the current year, either the calendar year (December 31) or, in some companies, the fiscal year. |
| ERM | Enterprise risk management | Structured, organization-wide approach to identifying, assessing and responding to all significant risks, whether financial, operational, strategic or… |
| ERP | Enterprise resource planning | Integrated business software that runs core processes such as finance, procurement, inventory, manufacturing, sales orders and HR on a shared database. |
| ESG | Environmental, social and governance | Framework for evaluating companies on non-financial factors: environmental impact (emissions, waste, water use), social issues (labor practices, diversity, community… |
| FMEA | Failure mode and effects analysis | Systematic method for identifying the ways a product, process or system could fail, the effects of each failure and their causes, then ranking risks so the most serious… |
| GRC | Governance, risk and compliance | Integrated approach that aligns corporate governance, risk management and regulatory compliance so they share data, controls and reporting. |
| GTM | Go-to-market | Plan for launching a product or entering a market, covering target customers, value proposition, pricing, sales channels and marketing. |
| HiPPO | Highest paid person's opinion | Tendency for meeting decisions to follow the view of the most senior or highest-paid person present rather than data or evidence. |
| ITT | Invitation to tender | Formal request, common in UK and EU public procurement, asking qualified suppliers to submit bids for a defined contract. |
| JV | Joint venture | Business arrangement in which two or more parties pool resources for a specific project or ongoing business while remaining otherwise independent, sharing control… |
| KPI | Key performance indicator | A quantifiable measure that tracks how well a company, team or individual is meeting a stated objective, such as monthly revenue, customer churn, on-time delivery or… |
| KRA | Key result area | Broad area of responsibility in which a job holder or team is expected to deliver results, such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction or compliance. |
| KRI | Key risk indicator | Metric that signals rising exposure to a particular risk before it turns into a loss, such as staff turnover in a critical team, overdue audit findings or system… |
| KT | Knowledge transfer | Structured handover of skills, information and documentation from one person or team to another, for example when an employee leaves, a project moves into operations or… |
| LOB | Line of business | Group of related products or services that a company manages and reports on as a distinct area, such as retail banking, commercial lending and wealth management within… |
| MBO | Management by objectives | Management approach in which managers and employees jointly agree on specific objectives, then measure and reward performance against them. |
| MBWA | Management by walking around | Leadership style in which managers leave their desks and visit work areas informally to talk with employees, observe operations and spot problems early. |
| MECE | Mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive | Principle for structuring problems and lists so that categories do not overlap and together cover every possibility. |
| MIS | Management information system | Computer-based system that collects operational data and turns it into regular reports, such as sales summaries, inventory status and budget variances, for managers at… |
| MNC | Multinational corporation | Company that owns or controls production, services or subsidiaries in more than one country, managed from a headquarters in its home country. |
| MoM | Minutes of meeting | Refers to the written record of a meeting's discussion, decisions and action items, circulated afterward to attendees. |
| MVP | Minimum viable product | Earliest version of a product with just enough features to be used by real customers and generate feedback, built to test a business hypothesis with minimal time and… |
| OEE | Overall equipment effectiveness | Manufacturing metric that combines availability (uptime), performance (speed) and quality (good parts) into a single percentage showing how productive a machine or line… |
| OGSM | Objectives, goals, strategies and measures | One-page strategic planning framework that states a broad objective, specific goals, the strategies to achieve them and the measures used to track progress. |
| OKR | Objectives and key results | Goal-setting framework in which each objective, a qualitative statement of what to achieve, is paired with three to five measurable key results that show whether it was… |
| PDCA | Plan-do-check-act | Four-step iterative cycle for continuous improvement: plan a change, do it on a small scale, check the results and act by adopting, adjusting or abandoning the change. |
| PEST | Political, economic, social and technological | Framework for scanning the external macro-environment of a business by grouping outside forces into four categories. |
| PESTLE | Political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental | Extended version of PEST analysis that adds legal factors (employment law, consumer protection, competition rules) and environmental factors (climate policy, resource… |
| PMF | Product-market fit | Point at which a product satisfies strong market demand, shown by customers buying, using and recommending it without heavy persuasion. |
| QA | Quality assurance (software) | The discipline and team responsible for preventing defects and verifying that software meets requirements, through test planning, manual and automated testing, and… |
| QBR | Quarterly business review | Meeting held every three months, usually between a vendor and a key customer or between a team and leadership, to review results against goals, discuss issues and agree… |
| QC | Quality control | Product-focused activities that inspect, test or measure output to catch defects before goods or services reach the customer. |
| R&D | Research and development | Activities a company undertakes to create new products, processes or technologies, or to improve existing ones, ranging from basic research to engineering and… |
| RCA | Root cause analysis | Structured investigation to find the underlying causes of a failure, accident or quality problem rather than only its symptoms, so that corrective actions prevent… |
| RFI | Request for information | Preliminary procurement document that gathers general information about suppliers' capabilities, products and approaches before a buyer writes a formal RFP or RFQ. |
| RFP | Request for proposal | Formal document in which an organization describes a project or need and invites vendors to submit detailed proposals covering approach, timeline and price. |
| RFQ | Request for quotation | Procurement document asking suppliers to quote prices and delivery terms for goods or services whose specifications are already fixed, such as 10,000 units of a… |
| RFT | Request for tender | Invitation, mainly in British, Australian and other Commonwealth usage, for suppliers to submit a formal sealed bid to supply goods, services or works under set… |
| SAM | Serviceable addressable market | Portion of the total addressable market that a company can actually reach with its current products, sales channels and geography. |
| SBU | Strategic business unit | Business unit large and independent enough to have its own mission, competitors and strategy, managed as a separate profit center within a diversified company. |
| SLA | Service-level agreement | Contract or contract section that defines the measurable level of service a provider commits to, such as 99.9 percent uptime, a four-hour response time or a two-day… |
| SLT | Senior leadership team | Top management group of an organization, including the chief executive or principal and senior function heads, responsible for strategy and major decisions. |
| SMART | Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound | Checklist for writing goals so they can be tracked: each goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant to wider aims and tied to a deadline. |
| SMB | Small and midsize business | Company below a size threshold, usually defined by employee count or revenue, that technology vendors, banks and service providers treat as a distinct market segment. |
| SME | Small and medium-sized enterprise | Business whose headcount, turnover or balance sheet falls below set thresholds, a classification governments and lenders use to target support, grants and lighter… |
| SOM | Serviceable obtainable market | Share of the serviceable addressable market that a company can realistically capture in the near term, given competition, sales capacity and budget. |
| SOP | Standard operating procedure | Written step-by-step instructions describing how to carry out a routine task consistently and safely, such as closing a store, onboarding a supplier or cleaning lab… |
| SPC | Statistical process control | Use of statistical methods, especially control charts, to monitor a manufacturing process and detect when variation exceeds what is normal, so problems are corrected… |
| SSC | Shared services center | Internal unit that centralizes transactional support functions, such as accounting, payroll, procurement and IT help desk, to serve multiple business units from one… |
| SWOT | Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats | Strategic planning tool that lays out an organization's internal strengths and weaknesses alongside the external opportunities and threats it faces, usually in a… |
| TAM | Total addressable market | Total revenue opportunity available if a product captured 100 percent of its market, calculated from the number of potential customers multiplied by annual spend per… |
| TCO | Total cost of ownership | Full cost of acquiring, operating and disposing of an asset over its life, including purchase price, installation, training, maintenance, energy, downtime and resale or… |
| TOC | Theory of constraints | Management philosophy holding that every system's output is limited by a small number of constraints, or bottlenecks, and that improving anything other than the… |
| ToR | Terms of reference | Sets out the purpose, scope, membership and responsibilities of a committee, project, inquiry or review. |
| TPS | Toyota Production System | Manufacturing approach developed at Toyota that aims to eliminate waste and produce only what is needed, when it is needed, through just-in-time production and jidoka… |
| TQM | Total quality management | Organization-wide approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction, in which every employee takes part in continuously improving processes, products and… |
| VRIO | Value, rarity, imitability, organization | Framework for judging whether a company's resources or capabilities give it a lasting competitive advantage by asking whether each is valuable, rare, costly to imitate… |
| VUCA | Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity | Shorthand for an unpredictable, fast-changing environment in which plans are quickly overtaken by events. |
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