Creating a Glossary: Business Analyst Terminology

Mine was many years ago, running a workshop for a debt factoring company. The task was to create some use cases for a new admin system, and quite frankly, the first morning was bad. There were lots of puzzled looks in the meeting, even though these were a  crowd of smart business experts. So I fell back on the trusted approach – if technique A doesn’t work, try B. And my default ‘Plan B’ technique is ‘create a domain model’ : really just an enhanced glossary. When we got to the bit about “Customer/Client” – which I had been using interchangeably all morning-  and I asked ‘about how many customers/clients do you have‘, I was stunned by the reply – “5000 clients, and 5M customers‘ (maybe it was the other way round – was too stunned to think straight)

WHAT!

“Customer” = “Client” – right ?

Wrong.

In their world, they are as different and up & down. Lesson learned.

And make the glossary a managed knowledge asset like all the others. Make sure to record where definitions came from (see Provenance) and don’t let people randomly change definitions just because they think they have a better idea. And include it in documents, with references, so everyone gets used to the idea of a common set of terms.