Tagged with 'wiki'

What about using a wiki as a war room, a single location for strategic action-packed activity surrounding a specific set of goals? Wikis have lots of great features that make it an ideal collaborative web space. We’re not the first to think of this either - this article from a wiki about using wikis for Project Management discusses Building a Virtual War Room. But Duo has an excellent example of using an internal wiki page as a command center, a war room of sorts.

Duo uses its internal wiki to document and collaborate on mission-critical projects, like Chicago Park District registration. When the throughput gets intense, the Duo Consulting team uses an internal wiki as a war room for troubleshooting a web application that contains underlying SQL queries to help Chicagoans register for park department offerings. The wiki becomes a strategic command center, a virtual room from which information is gathered and decisions are made. With a slogan for Chicago Parks like “Come out and play” a war room metaphor seems opposite to the end game, but the team must attempt fully concentrated efforts and strategic decision making from one location. There are a couple of reasons why the wiki is so useful:

• there are so many people involved, with so many time-critical tasks and dependencies, that one central location that shows the progress prior to registration helps keep the team on track as a team
• during registration itself, there are so many people monitoring so many different aspects of the application all at once that they need one central location to store that information, as well as knowing who is responsible for following up on any immediate issues
• the wiki engine itself does an awesome job of syntax highlighting and storing SQL queries
• the team can use the wiki as a task list, crossing off items as they’re done.

A specific scenario as an example: one team member might log an issue where a patron can’t register for a particular class. The site is giving the user conflicting information about whether the class is sold out already or not. Another team member might throw up the raw database SQL for that class display on the wiki, and a third team mate might closely analyze that SQL for clues as to what the underlying issue really is – all within minutes, because it’s so important for people to be able to register for these programs as quickly as possible. It’s like the wiki page is the heads-up display in the war room.

Kelly Tetterton, director of development at Duo says, “In some ways, I would imagine working on Chicago Parks Department registration is not entirely dissimilar from working at the air traffic control tower at O’Hare – it feels like that kind of high-pressure, high-intensity experience.”

I’d say that wiki updates give more immediate answers to questions than emailing and waiting for a reply. Wikis make all decisions known to all who monitor the pages. Wikis let you display mission-critical information in a heads-up display or you can print if you happen to like your clipboard or three-ring binder. Wiki’s history pages give you the path to the decision made, and wiki discussion pages can contain lively back and forth while the main page maintains the “truth” decision for the time being.

Let’s hear some war stories - how are you using internal wikis as your strategic project war room?

Last week, I attended a brown-bag lunch on social media organized by the Association Forum. While we started the discussion talking about blogs and various other social media, the conversation soon gravitated to the pros/cons and dos/don’ts of corporate wikis. And if the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC) study is accurate, it’s no wonder: the study predicts that by 2009, at least 50% of organizations will use wikis as important work collaboration tools.

The APC identified 7 strategies after surveying more than 160 “active corporate wiki users.” I’ll focus on integration and culture.

Integration
I know I’ve already talked about integration in my last two blog posts, but I can’t emphasize this point enough. Just like you wouldn’t hire someone and then seat them in a faraway corner, separated from everyone else, new media has to be fully integrated within the company for it to truly be effective. As the APC report states, the wiki should be integrated as “one of several important tools in an organization’s IT collaboration architecture.”

Culture
One of the APC’s recommendations is to understand that “wikis are best used in work cultures that encourage collaboration. Without an appropriate fit with the workplace culture, wiki technology will be of limited value in sharing knowledge, ideas and practices.”

At Duo, collaboration is one of our core values. To facilitate collaboration, we started an internal wiki two years ago. “At first, I thought only the tech guys would use the wiki, but I’m amazed at how quickly everyone in the company embraced it. Now the project managers use it regularly… and the wiki has become a repository of shared knowledge, great for troubleshooting issues,” said Jason Priestas, a senior developer.

For companies where active collaboration and open sharing of information is not so much a part of the work culture, a fellow participant at the Association Forum brown-bag lunch recommended some ways to make wiki use a habit. For example, instead of simply answering questions over email, people can be incentivized to direct each other to the wiki instead. The APC also suggests assigning a champion to each wiki.

Interestingly, the State Department has its own internal wiki, Diplopedia, a resource that contains biographies of political and business leaders, reading lists and even instructions on how to order lunch. It may surprise some that such a top-down organization is actively using grassroots technology – especially technology that allows anyone to change entries. But according to Noam Cohen, “Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down.” Such safeguards have, so far, successfully prevented people from “committing career suicide,” as Mr Johnson from the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy puts it.

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To learn more about wikis and how to implement them effectively, come listen to the wiki master and evangelist, Stewart Mader, give his keynote address at the Web Content Conference 2009 in Tampa Bay, Florida! Mader is the author of Wikipatterns: A Practical Guide to Improving Productivity and Collaboration in Your Organization and founder of Wikipatterns.com.