Building your List of Terms
Common language as an organisational maturity indicator
“Common language” sits at level 1 of Kerzner’s Five Levels of Project Management Maturity. It represents the collective understanding of Project Management concepts which exists amongst the people in the organisation. If people have fuzzy and disparate ideas about what certain terms mean, or if they unwittingly use disparate terms to mean the same thing, then the organisation is not yet at Level 1.
Common language as a Project Management maturity indicator doesn’t mean that everyone in the business must speak the same language—English, Xhosa, Portuguese or whatever—as they go about their work. It does mean that when a Project Management term is used in conversation or in a document, there is a shared understanding of what it means, and of its implication in the context in which it is used.
Now, many businesses strive to integrate the jargon specific to their industry or discipline (e.g. engineering, molecular biology, weddings) in their work. However, there is seldom any conscious effort to foster a common understanding of non-technical terms used as carriers of abstract ideas or Project Management concepts. This leads to big problems, which we explain in our other articles.
Doing things right, from the start
In the online Project Management Concepts course, we help you get into a habit aimed at preventing these problems. Very early in the course, we guide you in setting up your List of Terms, which has the subtitle, “When we say…, we mean.” You use this document to define concepts as you progress through the course (and hopefully also thereafter!).
Notice that we don’t call this document a dictionary, glossary, lexicon, thesaurus or definition list. This is because choosing only one format may be too restrictive at first. Your List of Terms should allow you to use a variety of tools to distil and crystallise your comprehension of the terms, and to discuss them with others. Sometimes, the definition format may work well for you; for other terms, juxtaposition or antonyms may work better; and in still other cases, it may be easier for you to use a scenario, metaphor or a sample sentence.
Your List of Terms is critical to doing your work and to studying towards knowledge.
