Intraversed myth busting:
Glossaries require too many stakeholders to be successful (or even establish)

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The Myth

Glossaries require too many stakeholders to be successful (or even establish). You’ll never achieve alignment across the many stakeholders from each business silo – it’s just too hard.

Why people believe the myth

In the IT world, experience seems to indicate that business stakeholders don’t have the inclination to adjust their language to prevent misunderstandings. Therefore, it can seem like a better (easier) idea to just allow all the different definitions for a single term to be entered into the business glossary, noting which department provided the definition (if you bother creating a glossary at all). After all, surely everyone knows what a customer is, or a student? We can let them all have their different definitions – we’re all essentially on the same page.

The Problem with the Myth

A glossary that has questionable, confusing or conflicting content will have no users. Therefore, creating a glossary that holds many definitions truly is a waste of time.

Further, projects won’t have clear definitions of the business terms that represent the data that the projects are to deliver. So developers will spend valuable time and project budget talking to stakeholders and convening workshops to clarity these definitions.

A single definition will have to be achieved, either for your glossary or for your project. Do it once for your glossary and all projects will have definitions at the ready. Do it for each project and you’ll repeatedly spend time defining and re-defining things – or worse, developers will inadvertently use a wrong definition and the project will fail to deliver what is needed.

In one example, a project was to deliver a dashboard of financial performance by brand. There was no clear definition of “brand” and four different and conflicting sources of reference data. The project team decided that they needed to create another source “with the correct values”, but these were based on the opinion of one business stakeholder.

In another example, a university’s courses were significantly undersubscribed. When their student analytics system registered that the intake quota had been reached, no further offers were made – but clearly the quota was not reached. Why the discrepancy? The definition of “student” used in the system included those who had not accepted an offer or were alumni, so the count of “students” in their system was inflated.

What We Suggest Instead of This Myth

Building a successful glossary ensures terms have one definition that’s understood and agreed to by all stakeholders, and future projects can trust these definitions with confidence. It’s difficult, but whether it happens in the development of a glossary or with individual projects, the defining has to take place. Defining once-for-all in an actively managed glossary is the most efficient and effective way.

Achieving agreement among stakeholders is possible with the right approach to facilitating workshops, using a proven method of addressing ambiguity of term names, and applying a structured definition approach that supports easy agreement. This is where Intraversed are particularly specialised.

Successful glossary workshops also create an engaged community of contributing stakeholders who understand the value of sharing knowledge and working through different points of view, which encourages cross-area collaboration and innovation.

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