Micro to Macro PM: The Wiki Way

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Micro to Macro PM: The Wiki Way
Jordan Frank (January 24, 2008)

Simple to implement and use, wikis create an environment that promotes collaboration and communication on projects of all sizes, from planning and requirements to reporting and archiving. More profoundly, wikis enable project teams to put much-needed context around their actions, and provide flexible pathways for everyone to contribute.

Anyone surfing the Internet is by now familiar with the most common wiki application Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows users to create, edit and link content. But well before wikis went mainstream, technical communities were employing wikis to share and update information, and today project teams are the primary users of enterprise wiki technology. Many project team members like the idea of using a wiki to “build out a site” for their product or program. Others may want one to manage requirements documentation. And most ultimately bend the wiki for blog-style status reporting, meeting agendas and other communication.

Enterprise wikis are platforms that can support one or more workspaces where users, depending on permissions, can post, link, read, tag and edit pages. More sophisticated wiki platforms support attachments, attachment versioning, permission-filtered search, logic-driven views to assemble an array of pages for view or export to Word or PDF formats, and notifications.

Using a wiki alongside — or instead of — traditional groupware is a paradigm shift for many folks:

> from documents to pages

> from folders to tags

> from weekly status reports to situational awareness

> from “need to know” to “can know” project spaces

This may seem like a major shift, but it relieves project teams of rigidities presented by document formats, and provides a simple model for information exchange that works in a very familiar way, like the web.

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