Everyone’s heard of office “lingo” before. You know those words that are thrown around the office, which no one but the people who work there actually understand. How annoying has it been as an outsider, sitting on the other end of the fence, trying to decipher the “secret code” or language others are speaking. Loads of fun, isn’t it? According to dictionary.com, “lingo” is:
The language and speech, esp. the jargon, slang, or argot, of a particular field, group, or individual.
The Method team is just as guilty of this. Most recently I had Judy Syms (a MCAM) email me saying “Danny, what’s a BSC?” I used the term freely in an email to her and it dawned on me at that very minute that I was guilty of using “internal lingo”. To help our fellow MSP’s and Method Community, I’ve asked the Method Team to help me build a list of the most common terms you’ll hear us use in various communications.
Terms the Method Team and I commonly use:
“BSC” – Business Systems Consultants are the direct point of contact for Method clients and assist in the customization of Method to fit their unique business needs.
“MSP” – Method Solution Providers are an extension of the Method Team and consist of MCC’s and MCAM’s.
“MCC” – Method Certified Consultants are members of the MSP community and provide value added services through local training, implementation and customization services. They are also required to pass an exam to maintain this designation.
“MCAM” – Method Certified Account Managers are members of the MSP community and are also resellers of Method. Similar to a BSC, a MCAM is the direct point of contact for any client who registers through a MCAM.
“ProAdvisor” – ProAdvisors are independent CPA’s, accountants, bookkeepers, computer consultants and trainers who work with small businesses and who have completed a rigorous and comprehensive QuickBooks curriculum developed by Intuit.
“ISP” – Intuit Solution Providers have expertise in technology and solutions integration for small-to-medium sized businesses. They are authorized to resell, implement, and support QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, Intuit QuickBase, and other Intuit and third-party products.
“SNH” – Scaling New Heights is a yearly conference conducted by Joe Woodard, focused on Intuit products and other third-party applications, which Joe uses in his own practice. This includes Method, of course.
“NAN” – National Advisor Network is a professional group of experienced and highly knowledgeable Intuit Advisors (i.e. QuickBooks ProAdvisors and Intuit Solution Providers).
“SGN” – The Sleeter Group Network is a kcommunity of experts who provide consulting services to small business owners in the accounting software and business process design areas.
Terms from our head geek – Manish:
“Agile” – is a software development methodology based on iterative and incremental development process.
“Scrum” – is an “Agile” approach to software development. The word came from Rugby game, where team hisses and discusses the strategy quickly during the opening bell.
“Sprint” – are the monthly builds/releases.
“SaaS” – Software as a Service is software that is deployed over the internet and/or is deployed to run behind a firewall. Also known as “software on demand”.
Terms from our fearless leader – Paul:
“Branch” – Essentially, this is our “next” version of Method. After we publish the latest awesome new features and improvements... we start our geeky coding process all over again! We create a copy of the source code and start ripping it up with the new feature requests we have planned. It will take the full 4 week “Sprint” before the code written on the branch is ready to go live.
“Trunk” – In short, this is the “current” version of Method. Whenever we publish the “branch” code to the live site, it is frozen and is named as the “trunk” version. We don’t add any features here, we just keep it stable in case we need to do a minor hot fix while the team pours all their energy into coding the next version on the branch.
So there you have it. You can print a quick reference card if you like and put it next to your desk, if that helps. 
- Danny