Wiki-Enabled Management

Wiki and Educause 2007 | 26 October 2007 | Geof Corb & Steve Hellen Project Management

Introduction

What is a wiki?

What do I need to know about implementing a wiki?

How can I use a wiki to…

improve the management of projects and systems?

improve collaboration and communications within my organization?

Demonstrate that it works

Outcomes and observations

Introduction to Wiki

What is a wiki? Source: Wikipedia (25-Oct-2007; version 166712647 )

Wiki Benefits

Simple and Efficient

Easy to use

Easy to learn

Easy to implement

Accessible Content

Web-based

Ubiquitous access

Flexible

Inexpensive

Unlike many software tools that have a steep learning curve, require training to use, and are advertised on the number of features included, wiki developers take the opposite approach. The resulting simplicity of the wiki has a compounding effect, that is, the more people use it, the more they want to keep using it and their contributions become vital to the growth of information and community. -- Stewart Mader, Using Wiki in Education

What can a wiki do for you?

Establish an institutional memory

Bring your e-mail conversations public and archive them for posterity

Escape from document management hell

Stop sending documents around via e-mail

Always know what is the latest version and review version history

Find what you are looking for

Index wiki page content and common file types

Reduce organizational spam

What can a wiki do for you?

Diminish boundaries and limitations of time and space

Help remote workers feel less remote

Know what is going on even when you are not there

Allow contributors to contribute at the time and place they are able to do so

Reduce frustration of not being up-to-date or not being able to participate more fully

Promote collaboration

Incidental or accidental

Progressive elaboration

Improve customer service

Discover opportunities to better service your customers

Products

Commercial

Atlassian Confluence – http://www.atlassian.com

Socialtext – http://www.socialtext.com

Open-Source

TWiki – http://www.twiki.org

MediaWiki – http://www.mediawiki.org

ASP/Hosted Services

Wikia – http://www.wikia.com Wikidot - http://www.wikidot.com

… and many more

Compare them at WikiMatrix ( http://www.wikimatrix.org )

Project Management

Wikis can be used to support all aspects of the project management lifecycle

Repository of project artifacts for all aspects of project lifecycle

From Wikinomics :

Wikis distribute the burden of organization across a collaborative network instead of making an individual project manager a choke point.

"Now everyone can make incremental progress without having to wait for everyone else. It's like parallel processing for people rather than computers." -- Tantek Çelik, Techronati's chief technologist

Considerations for Implementing a Wiki

Content & Access

How open are you willing to be?

Do you restrict access? To whom? Why?

Are you open outside your firewall?

Remember: openness fosters trust

Transparency

How much are you willing to share?

Responsibility

Can you trust your authors?

Sensitivity

How sensitive is your content?

Closed to the general public; open to those involved with SIS projects and initiatives. In general, anyone with access can create new content and improve existing content; there are few spaces with access restrictions.

Structure

Do you build a skeleton or scaffold for content or let content grow organically?

A wiki should start out with the least amount of structure necessary and structure should only be added over time, when needed

Let people contribute in a way that satisfies them.

No specific structure has been imposed on JHU’s wiki; spaces and pages have grown organically. Standards have evolved by cloning existing content as templates rather than through imposition.

Product Selection

Commercial or open-source product?

Platform?

Self-hosted or ASP?

Flexibility?

Extensibility?

JHU selected Atlassian’s Confluence and hosts the system locally.

Getting Started

Wiki in Action

The History of Our Wiki

Initially implemented our wiki to provide an environment for online collaboration between schools implementing the same new-to-market student information system

FAILURE – lack of adoption and use

So… instead, we used our wiki as a solution to a variety of long-standing problems plaguing our project:

Document management

Indexing and searching

Versioning

Communications

E-mail overload (“institutional spam”)

Loss of Knowledge

Reliance on consultants, staff turnover and rapidly-evolving product

know.isis.jhu.edu

Comprehensive Knowledge Base

All generally-accessible project assets are in the wiki or will ultimately be moved there

Documentation is iteratively developed and progressively elaborated

Repository for documentation

Knowledge Discovery

Content linking

Search pages, blogs, attachments, e-mail messages, etc.

Blogging by staff

Brainstorming & “Raw Collaboration”

Problem Solving & Consensus Building

Monitoring Progress and Status

“ Recently Updated”

Daily Summary E-Mail

RSS Feeds

Staff Favorites

Real-Time Information

Quick Reference Guides

Weekly Status Meeting

Managing Multiple Environments

Managing Releases

Contact Information

Weekly Design & Code Reviews

Wish Lists

Release Notes

What Users Want

What Users Do

Online Help

Policy Development

Departmental Intranet

Blogging Personal Status Reports

Secure or Sensitive Data

Outcomes and Observations

Outcomes: Adoption

Need a reason to collaborate to drive adoption

Need to build a critical mass of participants/users

Need to make it easy-to-use with a low barrier to entry

Outcomes: Changes in Work Habits

Fewer Word documents created

Wiki pages provide opportunity for earlier collaboration

Shift from push to pull

Now, rather than “pushing” separate copies of a document to each person, all collaborators are “pulled” in to a central place where everyone sees the same text.

adapted from Stewart Mader’s Using Wiki in Education An e-mail/Word document scenario has limited periods of creativity separated by the logistical and socially sensitive task of combining edits. The wiki completely changes this by shifting logistics to the shortest possible segment of time at the outset, leaving a much greater period of time for collaborative creativity and knowledge construction.

Outcomes: More Changes in Work Habits

Meetings frequently evolve into work sessions with a wiki page created to capture ideas

Content and ideas continue to evolve afterwards, pulling in more participants

… but requires effort to regroup and, often, make decision from among varying options

Less conversations take place over e-mail

… but we tend to send a lot of links to wiki content around!

Observations: Feature Usage

As with most applications, use of wiki features grows over time

But there is a barrier that most users do not cross

Working below that threshold, however, is typically sufficient and effective

Fastest adoption and advanced feature usage by “net-gen” staff

Observations: Wikis are not …

Wikis are not the right answer for all content

They do not replace rich features in specific applications such as Excel for calculations

Wikis are not a file share

Using as a means to simply store documents is recognized as misuse of wiki

Observations: Benefits

Entire project staff is more well-informed

As are those on the periphery of the project that want to be

Ad hoc community/team formation leads to both unanticipated interactions and more interactions across organizational boundaries

The speed and efficiency of our work is greatly increased by having information in one place, owned and maintained by everyone

What’s Next?

Summary

Wikis work at work

… but they take some work

Wikis provide a relatively inexpensive solution to a number of common [project] management, collaboration, and communication problems

Wikis will be (or already are) a pervasive part of our IT landscape

“ killer app for corporations”

Wiki-Enabled Management

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