Inception Board: Term Cloud

During inception one of the job of the inception team is to learn the terminology used by the business. Generally the board is put up with all the business buzzwords, terms that they use in their day to day job. We started doing that on one board called 'Term Cloud'. Generally this board gets populated as side effect of all the games & exercise we do during inception also know as glossary, domain terms.

Our team came with an idea to play 'term cloud' as one of the exercise during the inception in initial days.

Exercise: Build Term Cloud
Objective: Everyone speaks the same business terms including development team, SMEs and stakeholders. Helps with more collaborative communication during inception. Better domain understanding. Less confusions with buzzwords having same & different meanings.
When to play: After a few sessions (preferably on the second day after you get a critical mass of terms)
Duration: 15-20 min
Participants: Business SME's & Stakeholders
Preparation: Prepare board having 'Term Cloud' written on it with few samples.

How to Play: very simple & easy to facilitate.

1. Distributes stickets to write buzzwords, jargons, terms.
2. Remember one term one sticky.
3. Give 5 min to write all the terms.
4. Ask participant to go in round robin fashion, explain the term and put it up on the board.
5. Put small sticky if that term requires explanation.
6. If different terms has same meaning, club them together.
7. If same terms has multiple meaning, come up with new term for less used meaning.

Variations: 

1. Instead of everyone writing stickies, go in round robin and facilitator writes it on the board.
2. Create Term Cloud board and keep populating as and when new terms pops up. (old style)

How we did it?

Following is the sample from the inception that we are going through. Yellow sticky is the term and Orange is used as note to explain the term.

Sample Term Cloud Board