BlueBridge checklist and project plan for a glossary

On Microsoft SharePoint / O365 / Office Cloud.

Each project is different. Therefore, the following checklist, phases and task groups give you only a rough guideline for your project plan.
Nevertheless, we often see the same mistakes again:

• If you plan a glossary not only for your small team and you want to reach a bigger audience, then prefill your glossary with a relevant number of items before you open it to all readers. A very small glossary will be disappointing and readers won’t come back.
• There are many applications and other information sources in your company. Don’t think all your colleagues are just waiting for your glossary. You need to promote and “sell” it internally.
• You learned in the internet that some free information sources, like Wikipedia, are still growing and growing. A lot of highly motivated authors are working on that for free. Usually this won’t work in a company. The employees don’t have time for that. To fill your glossary the creation of glossary entries must be a task as all other tasks for the authors. This means the authors need time for that work, targets and you need to control the result. It should be a clear agreement how many entries an author must create in a specific time.

Focus

In praxis, there is no clear difference between a glossary and a lexicon. A glossary focuses on the explanation of terms, where a lexicon has a broader approach and provides knowledge to topics. It often provides more than a short explanation. Nevertheless, there is no clear border.
In this paper, we understand a glossary as a collection of terms, which are explained. Despite there are many common aspects, we don’t see this paper for a lexicon like Wikipedia.

Phases

The following phases show you the main tasks in a glossary project. Not all of them are necessary in all projects. In the most cases the phases are overlapping.
We see generally the following phases (task groups):

• Planning and Project Setup
• Glossary Prefill
• Promotion and “Selling”
• Maintenance and Control