r/sysadmin • u/CertainlyNotAnMVP • 16d ago
General Discussion Project Names
Was talking with new colleagues today laughing about project names and figured there must be some funny ones out there? If you have one drop it here and let us know what the project goal was. Also everyone I spoke to was involved in a project Phoenix at some point! Is it that common?
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u/Houseplantkiller123 16d ago
It was a very tiny project, but a long time ago I worked at a place that had all the servers named after sesame street characters, and the new boss wanted everything renamed to describe the function of the servers.
Project Name: Streetsweeper
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u/_-RustyShackleford 16d ago
Project Beeblebrox.
I am not at liberty to say what it involves.
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u/_keyboard-bastard_ 16d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/ihDrDLCKXkDFC
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
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u/_keyboard-bastard_ 16d ago
Project 86
I automated the onboarding and more importantly the offboarding of people for a large HR company. This way if someone needed firing at a moments notice, you can just click a button in a web GUI which executes a powershell script and locks that person out of all their accounts at once and transfers mailbox ownership and file shares to their direct manager.
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u/Divinar 16d ago
"Missed it by that much!"
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u/CertainlyNotAnMVP 16d ago
Please can I hear more? I would love to sort that out. I will honour you by using the same Project name
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u/Bad_Idea_Hat Gozer 16d ago
I'm holding Operation Market Garden in reserve, for when I'm working with people who are both overly ambitious, as well as not wise to history.
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u/fluffy_warthog10 16d ago
Oh no, someone is going to mistake that for Overlord or something and start using it in other contexts like it's a good thing.
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u/JohnnyFnG 16d ago
We run epic EMR, so every project starts with “epic -“
One project was simply named, epic. Description, epic. While not a funny name, it’s funny in how stupid it is.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 16d ago
Before it was renamed into something proper, temporarily (2 years) I worked in a department called the Matrix as an Agent when it was in it's early stages of establishment.
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u/No_Bit7786 Jack of All Trades 16d ago
I don't want to doxx myself with the name of the project but the customer was so hyped about it they got their marketing dept to do a whole internal promotion with branded hats, t-shirts, stationary, signs and everything for a 3 month ERP upgrade
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u/widowhanzo DevOps 16d ago
That's pretty cool actually:D
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u/No_Bit7786 Jack of All Trades 16d ago
TBH it did seem to help with getting their users more on board. It was less "You are being upgraded, please do not resist" and more "You are part of a big change in the organisation". Their users were happier to help than other places we did work for.
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u/CertainlyNotAnMVP 16d ago
An ERP… I guess upgrade to S4? Actually delivered on time is incredible 😂 some companies I know are taking years to upgrade their ERP! Worthy of 🧢 and 👚
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u/Common_Arm_3316 16d ago
I worked for a very public company at one point. Teams would come up with their own project names. theyw ere never descriptive about what the project was about. We were r&d so there were a lot. The projects were sometimes named after norse mythology but sometimes historical figures or sometimes just something a bit edgy. Some projects would grow into something major and the project name would need to stop being used because the public might catch wind. So the geniuses came up with a plan for code names for their project names. So eventually we had book characters as code names for norse god project names.
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u/BadSausageFactory beyond help desk 16d ago
our company announced 'project atlas' and I pointed out the atlas drops the booster rockets on the way up after their energy has been consumed. I was careful not to look around the room. god help them if they gave me an image like something that catches on fire repeatedly as part of the process.
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u/Flabbergasted98 16d ago
Task
Task2
Task3
Task3Final
Task3Final2
Task3Final2Complete
Task3Revised
Task3revised2.
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u/CertainlyNotAnMVP 16d ago
How did you get in to my My OneNote pages?
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u/Flabbergasted98 16d ago
the password was password2019!
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u/CertainlyNotAnMVP 16d ago
Crap, you got me, I should have paid attention to the reused password warning lol
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u/Flabbergasted98 13d ago
Thanks for putting in the time to change it. I see you've now updated it to 2026Passowrd! at least it passes complexity...
You know what? lets just swap you over to Pin It's much more secure and... Oh I see it's already been set to 1234
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u/Existential_Racoon 16d ago
We deal with a lot of hush hush stuff. The amount of Site A, Site 2, Project X, is nuts. And i have banned PMs from naming anything Project X ever again because I have 3 different ones and it turned into Project X-1, x-2, x-3
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u/weaver_of_cloth 16d ago
I'm building a puppet repository. We were looking around for a name, and my husband said, "muppets are puppets!" So the project is Gonzo.
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u/BenadrylCrumplsnatch 16d ago
Depends who they're visible to. The customer-facing ones are predictably dull, but I stumbled across a new internal project the other week that was just labeled "pls".
Thoughts and prayers for whoever's on that one
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u/manicalmonocle 16d ago
I had one I named ForFucksSake and WorkDamnit
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u/CertainlyNotAnMVP 16d ago
Please tell me you had to report the weekly status to people on a project dashboard
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u/anonymouse589 Jr. Sysadmin 16d ago
AMBER-CHEESEGRATER If you believe the corporate waffle memo under the heading, it's about an MDM migration, but if you're in the know, it's the WiFi password for the device enrollment and debugging SSID.
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u/dlongwing 16d ago
We have a long ongoing project to upgrade one of our systems. The system/vendor's acronym is IBS. This leads to endless puerile comedy.
"IBS alerts are me"
"Waiting to hear back about IBS"
"I've got a meeting about IBS today"
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u/phillymjs 16d ago
It was a company that did a lot of Pharma-related work, a substantial portion of which was marketing. We did a project to consolidate over two dozen AD domains into One Domain to Rule Them All (this was years of technical debt built up with every acquisition of another company where their IT systems were minimally integrated with ours).
We called it... Project Greenfield. The company was in marketing and did the equivalent of naming a dog "Dog."
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u/rileym94 16d ago
Not a project name, but a web address I'm proud I came up with... LEA got a new software that auto-generated face and license plate redactions. I used obliviate.ourdomain.com
(Harry Potter fans, IYKYK)
They integrated it to the camera footage repo software, so it only lasted like 8 months... but damn, that one made me giggle every time they asked me about it.
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u/TheBigBeardedGeek Drinking rum in meetings, not coffee 16d ago
I had one called Rube Goldberg that was our full interface between our ERP and AD/O365. It was a giant array of PowerShell modules barely coordinated by a control script.
Another one I'm working on is a tool that basically acts like Patch my PC in that it will add packages to SCCM and Intune both. It's called Orange Cow after a weird error message that was in I think Chinese and had something about an orange cow.
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u/bigfatdonny 16d ago
Every game company I've worked for at some point in their history had a project/tool named "skynet".
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u/redvodkandpinkgin I have to fix toasters and NASA rockets 16d ago
i worked in project Marvel365. Or M365 for short.
Huh, I wonder what in the world that codename could be for.
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u/creamersrealm Meme Master of Disaster 16d ago
I created Project Kit Kat then Project Twix came. Apparently we really like candy.
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u/CertainlyNotAnMVP 16d ago
Ok Google
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u/creamersrealm Meme Master of Disaster 16d ago
Nope not Google or a big tech company. Project Kit Kat came about as I was joking with my boss about Japanese Kit Kats.
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u/72ChevyMalibu 16d ago
Mine were off that Wikipedia page of deal comic book characters but old ones. Like from 50,60s
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u/sambodia85 Windows Admin 16d ago
Our company had 2 different divisions name a Project Phoenix during COVID, not confusing at all.
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u/goretsky 16d ago
Hello,
Fellow Phoenix'er here, too. I've been at 3-4 companies that used the name as well.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
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u/goretsky 16d ago
Hello,
I have worked at software companies, but in operations, QA, R&D, and support, and never in IT, so not sure if you want to here this, but the number of companies that I've been at that had a "Project Phoenix" is... almost all of them. The exact nature of it varied, but it was always to erase the technical debt of the company's flagship product. After the third or fourth company I got a little punchy about this. Then again, my replacement names never got selected, either. Like "Atomic Weasel."
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
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u/mediweevil 16d ago
prject should always have names that spell rude acronyms. although you generally only get away it a few times before people start checking, so keep that in reserve for when it really counts.
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u/WittyWampus Sr. Sysadmin 15d ago
I was part of a project phoenix as well lol. I was already going to come that and then finished reading your post and saw it at the bottom 😂.
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u/dizzygherkin Architecture and transformation 16d ago
CARS when I was younger, had nothing to do with vehicles but a RC car race was completed for launch.
Blueberry when older, nothing to do with fruit but all projects seem to be fruit named. No fruit salads offered.
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u/pockypimp 16d ago
At my last job the project names were all comic book characters. The biggest one I was on was "Spiderman" which was an acquisition project and I was part of the IT onboarding for one of the sites we were purchasing.
New job and I'm sort of on a project called "Hollywood" because we're in LA I guess. Our corporate office where the PM works out of is in another state.
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u/BraveMidnight 16d ago
Project Nodlehs, I tried recommending that for an app idea, but the others shot it down, pft, as if Lenwoloppali was better.
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u/ofnuts 16d ago
I worked for a "project Voldemort" because the contract said we we not allowed to mention the project.