Japanese
Due to the feature of our services, we are frequently asked to work with clients who expect us to improve the quality of their project management and project management office.
One of the issues that we often face in projects that we need to resolve is the lack of language integration.
As an example of a system implementation project, each customer (or even within the same customer company) has different operations, services, and solutions covered by each project. Against this background, it is common for the same meaning to be used in other words and for industry terminology to be significantly different.
In addition, even among members of the same project, the words used, and their meanings may differ slightly for each individual.
It is easy to imagine that if the differences in understanding caused by the above backgrounds are not resolved, problems such as being unable to carry out tasks that need to be carried out will occur.
Even amongst native Japanese speakers, there are many small and significant differences in understanding, and even within the same company, these issues may arise depending on the department, background, and age of the employee, and they become more serious when external members are involved in the project. Furthermore, understanding differences tend to be more frequent when members from different languages and cultures are involved in the project.
To solve this problem, it is a common practice to create a dictionary within the project and define the meaning of each term, but this requires a lot of effort and time. It is also important to remember to update it constantly.
As mentioned above, one of the first tasks a consultant should perform is to define terms.
Failure to do this in the early phases of a project always carries the risk of term discrepancies during the entire period. You can ‘define terms’ in the middle of the project, but it becomes more difficult to inform and solve this with the project members.
Defining terms is important in project management, as it avoids unnecessary confusion and contributes significantly to quality improvement. I hope this blog post will remind you of the importance of defining terms.