1. Telephone Game Phrases For Workplace
2. Telephone On Paper Team Building
3. Christmas Whisper Game Phrases

Broken Telephone. Organise students into groups of about 10. Give one student in each team a sentence. The student memorises the sentence and then passes it on to the next student by whispering. The next person passes the sentence down the line to the next and so on until it finally gets to the last person in the group.

Whether at work, at home, or on your mobile phone, here are 8 solid telephone etiquette tips everyone should be displaying at all times.

1. Always identify yourself at the beginning of all calls.

A) When in the office, always answer a telephone by saying: “Hello/Good Morning, Accounting Department, Syndi Seid speaking.”

B) From a cell phone, either simply say Hello, or state your name, Hello, Syndi Seid here. Do not answer by using words such as “yeah” or “yes.”

C) When placing a call, always state your name along with the name of the person you are calling. Example: “Hello, my name is John Doe from XYZ Corporation. May I please speak with Ms. Jane Smith?”

2. Be sensitive to the tone of your voice. Do not sound overly anxious, aggressive or pushy. It is important your tone conveys authority and confidence. Do not lean back in your chair when speaking on the telephone.

Tip: Sit up in your chair or stand during the conversation. When at home, use a personal tape recorder to privately record your own conversations. You will then hear how your sound to others.

3. Think through exactly what you plan to say and discuss BEFORE you place a call.

Tip: Jot down the items you want to discuss and questions you want answered. In other words, anticipate and expect you will be placed into a voicemail system; plan your message to be as direct and specific as possible, asking the person to respond to specific alternatives or questions. Do not say, “Hello, it’s Syndi, call me back.” At least state the subject about which you want the person to call you back about.

4. Do not allow interruptions to occur during conversations. Do not carry on side conversations with other people around you. The person on the telephone takes precedence over someone who happens to walk in your office or passes by while you are on the phone.

Tip: If you must interrupt the conversation, say to the person, “Please excuse me for a moment I’ll be right back.” And when you return, say, “Thank you for holding.”

5. Especially when leaving messages, speak clearly and slowly. Do not use broken phrases, slang or idioms. Always, always leave your return telephone number as part of your message, including the area code . . . and S-L-O-W-L-Y, including REPEATING your telephone number at the end of your message.

Tip: Practice leaving your number, by saying it aloud to yourself as slow as you have heard an informational operator say it.

6. Build the habit of always turning off your cell phone ringer when entering a meeting, restaurant, theater, training class, or other place where the purpose of your visit would be interrupted or others would be disturbed by hearing your cell phone ring.

Telephone Game Phrases For Workplace

Tip: If you are expecting an important call, inform the caller you will be in a meeting during certain times and state you will monitor your message indicator for when it illuminates you will excuse yourself to leave the meeting and return the call.

7. Always speak into the telephone receiver with an even and low tone of voice. Especially when speaking on a cell phone out in public, be sure to monitor how loud you may be.

Tip: Move the phone ear piece just slightly away from your ear and listen to yourself speaking. Discover whether you are speaking too loudly or too quietly for the other person to hear you.

8. Do not allow yourself to be distracted by other activities while speaking on the telephone, such as rustling papers, chewing and eating, working on the computer, or speaking with someone else. Most importantly, do not use a hand held cell phone while driving. Get a headset or speaker phone for the car.

Tip: Always treat every caller with the utmost courtesy and respect by giving him/her your undivided attention.

Question: What other items do you have to add to this list? Do let us hear from you by locating this article at www.AdvancedEtiquette.com/blog. You may also reach us at www.AdvancedEtiquette.com. If you enjoyed this article and want more, subscribe to our “Etiquette Tip of the Month” newsletter—at no charge—filled with great monthly tips on all sorts of topics from international business and social etiquette and protocol to everyday life subjects. It will be great to have you as a member of our happy family of subscribers at www.AdvancedEtiquette.com/subscribe.

Happy Practicing!

As with the broken telephone game, information is altered with each handoff. The resulting approach includes a lot of rework and escalating project costs due to combinations of the following:

• Use cases don’t properly represent customer requirements.
• UI/UX design is not consistent with the use cases.
• Incorrect test cases create false bugs.
• Missed test cases result in undiscovered bugs.
• Developers build features that don’t meet customer needs.

The further down the broken telephone line the original requirements get, the more distorted they become. For this reason, UI storyboards, test cases and code typically require a lot of reworking as requirements are misunderstood or improperly translated by the time they get to the UI and testing teams.

How Can We Reduce the Broken Telephone Effect?

The good news is that there are some reasonably simple changes to processes and deliverables that will decrease the broken telephone effect. The following techniques share the goal of reducing handoffs and translations.

Interview the customer with cross-discipline teams

One method is to involve the BA, UI/UX and quality assurance people directly in the elicitation process with the customer. You can even make a case to include the lead developer as well. Having all disciplines represented during the interview process lets each party hear requirements directly from the customer, reducing the reliance on BA documents alone. An equally important benefit is that each discipline brings a different perspective, which can lead the interview process down different paths of conversation and requirement gathering.

For example, the QA resource may ask more questions about the requirements related to edge or error conditions than the BA or UI/UX resource. Putting a UI/UX member in front of the customer will provide a chance to understand features that are frequently used to manage the cognitive load of the end user.

Combine and evolve use cases, UI mockups, and UI storyboards into an integrated deliverable

Another approach to reduce the broken telephone effect is to avoid creating use cases, mockups and storyboards as separate deliverables by combining them into one “integrated deliverable.” To create an integrated deliverable, start with the use case and attach UI mockups to each step. This automatically creates a UI storyboard that has the same steps (including main and alternate flows) as the use case, and means they don’t get out of sync. Also, since the UI mockups are attached to each step, you know they will be consistent with the purpose and requirements outlined in the step.

Often, new requirements or changes to existing requirements emerge, and if your storyboards and mockups are separate from the use cases, the original use cases are not updated. This creates confusion for your developers, testers and stakeholders. Combining your use cases, mockups and storyboards into one integrated deliverable makes it much easier to keep all three in sync, dramatically reducing the potential for conflicting requirements.

The integrated deliverable approach encourages collaborative and combined authoring and review of use cases and UI/UX design by your BA and UI/UX teams, resulting in more accurately defined and understood requirements.

To bring this concept to life, here’s an example that starts with the use case defined by the BA or product manager, without any mention of UI-specific requirements.

Use Case: ATM Cash Withdraw

The steps with the Y-shaped symbol are steps with alternate flows.

Alternate Flows

When the UI/UX team starts attaching UI mockups to each of the steps, a UI storyboard is created that uses the same exact main flow and alternate flows as the use case. A UI storyboard expressed in terms of a main flow and alternate flows has the benefit of reducing the number of traditional linear storyboards. If you were to create traditional UI storyboards for each of the unique paths through the use case above, you’d have 11 in total, with duplicated steps across them. UI storyboards with main flows and alternate flows reduce rework and errors that pop up in linear UI storyboards.

You can do this in Word by inserting UI mockup images created in a different UI mockup tool, but keeping the UI mockups up to date in the will become time-consuming and error-prone. Products such as PowerStory (a plugin for PowerPoint) make this easier by enabling you to combine use case steps with UI mockups to create UI Storyboards.

In the following screen shot you will see that PowerStory adds a panel specifically designed for creating main flows and alternate flows of use cases, and associates the steps in these flows with typical slides in PowerPoint.

As before, the steps with the Y-shaped symbol beside them indicate an alternate flow. When you hover over the icon you can view and enter the alternate flows associated with that step.

PowerPoint is an extremely powerful tool for creating UI Mockups that can support more UI design ideas than typical wireframe mockup tools, especially with plugins like PowerMockup and Microsoft’s upcoming storyboarding plugin.

Telephone On Paper Team Building

Write use cases and UI storyboards with testing in mind

Test cases typically include a “user action” followed by an “expected result.' If you spend a little more up-front time defining which steps are “user actions” and which steps are “expected results” when creating your use cases and UI storyboards, you can save your testing team time. Use cases are well suited for this approach by defining the principle actor for each step. Any step where the actor is a system should be classified as an “expected result” step for the test case, and any step where the actor is an end user should be labeled “user action.”

One of the test cases derived from the combined use case defined above is shown below, following the rule that a step with an end user actor is an action and a step that has a system actor is an expected result.

Christmas Whisper Game Phrases

Automate the creation of your test cases directly from your use cases

Using tools that will automatically generate test cases from your use cases and UI storyboards will save you a significant amount of time and money typically spent by your testing team creating manual test cases. In the context of this article, it also eliminates a handoff and thus mitigates the broken telephone effect. When QA teams interpret requirements and translate them into test cases, they might misunderstand requirements and create faulty test cases and/or miss requirements and their corresponding test cases.

Key Points to Take Away

Developing software requirements, UI designs, and test cases can mirror the broken telephone game we all played as kids. Every time we pass information on, it gets changed and misinterpreted, leading to increased project costs and the delivery of the wrong solutions to your customers. Following the steps outlined above, you can reduce the broken telephone effect and follow a more streamlined process to clear and lucid product development.

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