Wikis & Project Management

Successfully managing a project is often a difficult task. Mixing deadlines, a limited amount of time, money & people to achieve loosely defined stuff make a good recipe for disaster. Here is how a wiki might help you minimize the bill.

Centralizing Helps

One of the recurrent problems of having a project spanning various corporate boundaries (between teams & deparments for instance) is that stuff happens in many different places (mailboxes, Enterprise IM, phone, shared drives...). With a wiki, you can have everybody adding their stuff to a central place where it can be organized through links & tags and be made available to all the people involved.

Keep Track of What's Happening

Every business wiki has a built-in notification feature, be it through RSS, email, dedicated pages or many of them at once. You can use this feature to stay up-to-date on who's contributing what & when they're doing it. Thanks to this, you won't have people arguing on whether or not the mail they were supposed to send ever arrived on time: if it's not on the wiki, it isn't there. Productivity seldom accommodates nitpickyness.

Share & Organize

Wiki pages are a great place to jot down every kind of information, ranging from a PDF or a MS Word file to a plain old scanned paper-note. Most search tools nowadays will be able to search into the content of pages & text attachments and rank the results to provide you with an effective way to access information. Even when loosely classified, the data you need will remain available on your wiki.

So mastering project management sounds good to you... what are you waiting to try and go wiki? 

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A Semantic Wiki?

It looks like "Semantic Web" is well on its way to become Web 3.0 most serious contender. But what is it all about?

To make a long story short, semantic web is a revolution currently going through its early stages. An example will make it easier to grasp: imagine you're looking into Wikipedia, willing to search only for XVIIth century French Poets. If nobody took the time to write a list of them, you're in for a long and strenuous time searching through heavy loadsof abstruse web pages.

This is where semantics get in. Imagine that, every time one adds a Poet name, he could "label" it with such informations as his birth and death dates, his nationality and the fact that he is a Poet. Or, to put it another way: that on the Poet's Wikipedia page the Poet's birth date was labelled as such and his death date, nationality and status as well. Now you could launch a search saying "I want to search Poets, and their nationality attribute has to be French, and either their birth or death year date must start by 17"

Instead of strict categories, you now have a loose yet effective way to enrich information all around the place in your wiki. Combine this with the power of people freely allowed to add the bits of information they know about, and you end up with a naturally organized body of knowledge - yet nobody had to decide how to organize it beforehand.

This is what Semantic Web is all about, and I must admit it sounds pretty exciting to me.


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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

What's Your Wiki Bringing?

There is too much information around for anyone to read all of it. This is why numerous tools have emerged to help people manage, organize, classify, filter and sort information. RSS has been a great step towards personal information independance, allowing individuals greater freedom as to what heir informations sources could be and how often new data was made available.

Breathing Through

Even the best RSS reader will not prevent one from feeling overwhelmed by bits of information. Social news rating websites have stepped in to help people go a bit further and order and give meaning to information together. Digg, Wikio, Newsvine are as many examples of ways to sort information. Wikipedia has done a great job to bring the right information to the right place for the people who are looking after it, or at least it does so most of the time.

Going Further

However, even with the help of those tools irrelevant information keeps popping out most of the time. Could this be avoided? Probably not. Could this be reduced a bit more? Certainly. Interactions between people about blog articles could be centralized for a group in one place to let them discuss and share it more easily. This is exactly what a product like XWiki Watch is aiming at doing, providing a team with a place where it will be able to share information and enrich it collaboratively.

Staying Ahead

The right question however is, why are all those information flows so important? Because, in today's world, information provides you with an advantage over your competitors. It has amways done so, but something changed recentlty: the speed at which relevant data can be exploited. A factory can be built quicker than ever before. Companies have to remain reactive not to get out of touch with their customer bases. A wiki provides a tool to let you communicate with the people who buy your products. Somehow, in their collective knowledge lies the products you will be offering them tomorrow. Isn't that worth a try?


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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A wiki for your sports team?

Back after some busy times... This afternoon I had the displeasure to find that my hockey team back home had lost a decisive game and was going down next season. This led me to think about how we could improve our performance, and I ended up thinking a wiki could fit the bill. Now I'm surprised I did not start thinking about it before...

The Problem

As a sports team made of people with day jobs, we can only meet for training so many times a week (usually twice for skills and tactic and once to run) notwithstanding a game on Sundays. Since a training session usually lasts about 2 hours, we hardly ever have enough time to study fancy diagrams about our positioning. This also means that we are not spending enough time reflecting about our past performances and how they could be improved. There is a communication problem here, and wiki are really good at solving that kind of problems.

The Needs

If I were to write a requirements specification, I'd say that I would need the following:

• A place where our coach could put diagrams showing how we played during our game compared with how we ought to have played + a page to explain his choices and talk about them.
  
• Personal pages for every player where they could write about their own game and get feedback from others through comments
• The ability to embed video shot during games or coming from the internet showing specific skills and situations

Generally speaking, we would need a place where to add all kinds of relevant information and organize it. This place would also need to be available to every player easily (through internet).

The Wiki Way

All of the components I talked about are common features of most wikis (though I did not talk about the search engine, the tags or RSS notification feeds, all of which are quite useful too). The main advantages would be to make lots of useful resources contributed by the coach and the players available to the rest of their team easily. No need to take a 45 minutes strategy talk in the cold on a Thursday night when you can discuss it at length on a wiki page (during a break at work for instance). What's more, most people can't be bothered to listen to tactical points when they are not involved in the situation described. The wiki would remove this inconvenient too.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

The WikiDroit Case-Study

WikiDroit is a website that was launched by a few French law students. Its aim was to create a database (in French) of law-related resources. However, created in October 2006 the website did not take off. Its example shows how and why a wiki may fail - and what to do to prevent this from happening.

Poor Wiki Integration

The first problem that can be identified is that the wiki does not make one with the rest of the website. Though an important effort has been given to design of the website, the wiki customization (based on MediaWiki) does not go further than a logo. Combined with the fact that the link to the wiki from the website opens in a new window, this means that the 2 entities are poorly held together. If you take the example of Curriki, the website and the wiki are closely integrated together so as to create a strong identity.

Lack of Original Content

The wiki could have survived this first mistake. However, the wiki itself was designed without an aim. Its stated mission is far too wide: "generalization and vulgarization of Law topics aiming at everyone". Wikipedia already exists! A wiki cannot work if it does not reach a breaking point in terms of contributors. In this case, the content added by the first contributors was not sufficient to bring in new ones. The general public already have enough Law-related information available on Wikipedia (Law Article) and Law students have a huge number of relevant textbooks available in any library. Thus there was no incentive for new members to come in and add content.

The Lessons From WikiDroit

How could have WikiDroit been successful? If the website had brought something original and relevant to its target audience. Think about this: every year, Law students go through exam papers and new questions. Would one not like a place where, on top of previous exam papers they would find their fellow students works, made available with the mark they received and tutors corrections? This would bring value to them and give them an incentive to contribute content. What's more, the content they could contribute would be readily available to each of them - but at the same time different for every of them, therefore increasing the interest of every single contribution. This could be linked to the Magnet Pattern: make the wiki a place for exclusive and attracting content.

To be successful, a wiki must bring something to its target audience. It must be an ease rather than a pain. Find a lack of data or ineffective communication: here a wiki might fit the bill.


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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A Wiki For Desktop Tower Defense?

A few weeks ago I discovered the Tower Desktop Defense through a link I got from a post I received in my XWiki Watch feed reader. I tried it and quickly became an addict, experimenting with new strategies and playing styles. The next step was to try and take advantage of the resources available on the website to improve my gameplay.

The Current Situation

To do so, I have access to different kind of resources: the quick start guide, which spells the basic rules and behaviour of the game; players top scores (I'll let you guess what that page does); players ' mazes which shows what other players mazes look like and which score they achieved using it; and lastly a forum broken down in categories such as general chit-chat and tips and tricks.

What's Good And What's Less Good With This

There is a lot of info available to improve the way you play, which is cool. But the point is, going through all of it is somewhat painful. For instance, along with basic rules I'd like a page showing me examples of good and poor mazes with an explanation of why they are so. I'd like the knowledgeable calculus explaining why this kind of tower is better than that one clearly spelled out on a page rather than on 3 different forum threads. And so on...

A Wiki Solution?

A wiki would bring some underlying structure to all this available data while in the same time tapping into and reinforcing the involvment of the players' community. It would be easir for fans of the game to improve the overall documentation and discuss about various potential strategic moves. An user could record its own progression and its best mazes on its user page. The stories behind great scores could be told by those who achieved them.

In short, a wiki would give an expression space to members of the community which would be both more effective and more rewarding than the current system.
Flexible structure, community power, effectiveness through collaboration... DesktopTD, will you embrace the Wiki Way?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis and Strategic Mindmapping

What if your company's top management started throwing its ideas on how your company stands compared with its competitors, how well it performs with its clients and what are its potential strategic choices on a mindmap? I started playing with the idea after giving a try to MindMeister, a collaborative, online, shared mindmapping tool. What could it look like?

Collaborative Mindmapping

The idea of a mindmap is somehow as old as human brains themselves. Mindmaps offer a great way to throw ideas around, keep track and organize them in a flexible yet powerful way. Mindmapping software has been around for some time now, with good Open-Source solutions available amongst others. These softwares have traditionally been thought to be used by one single user who could then share his thoughts with other. The possibility of real-time collaborative mindmapping brings in a whole new area of potential in the way people collaborate together.

The Wiki Connection

Take this example: imagine your top management board sharing ideas about how your company is run, what are the main issues facing it, which strategic path it should adopt and so on. Now imagine the resulting mindmap being turned into a wiki, with one page for every node on the map. Last stage, open this wiki to all of your company's employees and see what could happen.

The Effects Of Collaborative Intelligence

I already argued that there is a strong chance that the people who have the best insights about your competitors and your field of activity are the people working on the front-line, those who are in touch on a daily basis with your suppliers and customers. Retrieving their ideas thanks to a wiki built along the lines of your company top strategic thinking and making an analysis of them could prove an invaluable communication and information gathering for the people who run your business.

Wikis and Mindmaps share a lot of properties. Using them in coordination could create amazing collaboration tools. What if?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis and e-learning

Thought to become a revolution in the way we teach and learn, e-learning has not yet achieved its full potential. This is due to a lack of understanding of the way people do actually learn. Using a wiki instead of traditional e-learning tools does make a difference. Not convinced yet?

How we do not learn

We (assuming that here "we" refers to us all human beings) do not learn by staring blankly at blackboards. We did not do at school, and we do not either while staring blankly at webpages. We do not learn either by reading ill-written content served in an ill-conceived fashion by a Flash applet. Last but not least, we do not learn while interacting with silly pre-programmed answers offered by a computer, however clever its programmer think they have been.

How we do learn

We learn through our active interaction with people and problems. We learn while we experience interest in the subject of which mastering we are pursuing. We learn when an emotional transfer occurs during the studying process. Which part of your physics 101 course do you remember today: the textbook readings or the fuzzy chemical reactions in the labs? This is what learning is all about: interest for the topic and self-involvement in the learning process.

Learning through a wiki

A wiki offers a platform for clever learning together. The interaction with other people (human beings, not machines) provides us with feedback and new insights. There is additional motivation too, created as a byproduct from the involvement within a community of peers and of area of interest. You do not feel the same emotional bonds for a computer than for other people (At the very least I assume most people do not). There is an acknowledgment of oneself as an human being worth of being talked, discussed and spent time with in the process too.

The core issue? The structure of contemporary e-learning does not match the way we do learn. Inversely, a wiki goes in the right direction since it promotes learning through interaction.


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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis: The Next Step In Information Sharing

Contemporary education works around knowledge itself. Knowledge is often valued for itself rather than as a mean of achieving a given aim. In the same time, modern technologies give us access to more knowledge than one could ever have dreamt of decades ago. The shift is happening right now: knowledge is not the key, but rather access to the right information at the right time.

A Clever Database

A wiki is written by the very people who will be using it. A page about a given topic has many chances to contain all the relevant information about that topic since potential associations have been created by visitors to that article with the available body of knowledge. A wiki transforms raw information into a richer, more readily available and structured body of knowledge. It is an extensive and evolutive source of information. Specialised individuals can collaborate together better than ever before.

Coupled With Clever People

A wiki provides the structural through which users can collaborate and coordinate themselves easily. What is then the "perfect" user mindset? In this view, an user should be able to go and search for the information he is looking for in the rigths places rather than knowing everything by himself. Say, knowing how to access the right bookshelf rather than learning the full transcript of a book. Wikis push this trend to its limit. The relevant point is no longer in detaining knowledge itself, but in being able to draw the right connections. Individual specialization can be harnessed while minimizing its collateral negative effects.

Perfect collaboration?

The combination between intelligent users and a system that provides them with the structural basis through which tehy can interact and share together effectively open new perspectives for enterprise collaboration. The examples of Intelpedia or Pfizerpedia show how a seemingly hazardous move initiatedthe by an individual employee can bring value to the whole company. The viral nature of a wiki implies it spreading quickly. A wiki let us unleash the way we naturally tend to learn. Working together has at least found a meaning. Are you ready for this?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Why Wikis Will Revolutionize The Way We Think About Education

I realized a few days ago that the way education is currently provided to students around the world is becoming increasingly inefficient day after day. I read some time ago a paper that stated that the only thing that has remained still for the past 100 years is the classroom. This is true and really surprising.

The Classroom Concept

What are the main benefits of getting in a classroom? Obviously, grouping people in a place where they can be taught by someone with a specific experience in one field, that this person will try to communicate to his / her audience. Another feature of current formal education is the fact that the majority of it takes place before you are 25, and then abruptly stops. Does it means that you stop learning when you quit school? Or even that you are properly equipped for the tasks you have to do? No. The education you received was not personalized either, which means that in the bundle of knowledges you had to absorb a wide part will neither be of any use to you. Why should we go toschool and Uni for years without even learning things that are of direct interest to us? Wikis change this.

Lifelong learning?

Should lifelong learning take place in classrooms? Taken broadly, we are learning at every second of our lives. Learning how to do something specific, making connexions with what we already know, thinking baout new ways of doing things... Now with a wiki all those thoughts could not only be recorded easily, but at the same time be shared in a relevant space with people who could enrich their contents and their scope significantly. You do not need to be in the same place, at the same time anylonger to share with others. Now you can create communities of people interested in the same topic and start learning from one another in minutes. Boundaries are not a necessity. Free your knowledge!

Making intangible tangible

Most learning processes take place through interactions between people, not necessarily in a formalized manner. A wiki gives a place for the fruit of these interactions to be expressed and discussed with others. Little contributions from many end up in amazing results. You can teach yourself what you are interested in with the help of others who share your passion. Rating can take place through a pari assessment that understands comprehensively what you are trying to achieve and whether you succeeded at it. Within companies, it means that constant learning and formation concerns can be addresses much more effectivelly than ever before. Information flows and you have access to it.

Education and the ability to learn continuously are currently one of the most regarded assets in business life. A wiki will give your organization the power to pursue this objective effectively. Remember the World without Wikipedia ?

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A Wiki As An Open Point Of View On The World

A wiki lets people collectively transform a high amount of raw data into a useable and organized corpus of information. Most people have their own point of view about the world around us. Some of us even have more than one, depending on circumstances. But up to now there were no systematic way to transform those points of view into a coherent total.

Why Wikis Change This

A wiki gives a space for collaboration. Now you can get in one place all the content relevant to a given topic. With the help of Widgets you can now integrate content coming from various places and put it one one page. Our brain work by making associations between neurons. Now on a wiki we can all create relationships between bits of content and enrich them by linking them together easily, tagging them and retrieving their up-to-date content via RSS Syndication.

The Quest For Meaning

When searching on the internet, we are most of the time looking for an answer. Search engines are great, but sometimes do not turn up with the right answer. The same is true to a greater extent within companies: intranet are not meant to be easily searchable. The likes of Google Mini are starting to changing this, but even them cannot do more than automated search. The greatest benefit of a wiki in this context is that it lets people group relevant informaion together on one page (or set of pages).

Being Relevant

On a wiki, you can decide to give one page to every topic. This page will be enriched will all the content related to this topic. It will retrieve information from various different sources and be available at anytime, from anywhere. More than a reference sheet, the page will also be coherent: the content you will find on it is directly related to its title. Other potential meanings are listed and given pages on their own. How is that different from internet ? A wiki provides a place where information is classified following the needs of its very own users, where they can have a direct influence on every page. This is what 2-ways interaction means.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

9 Corporate Wiki Starting Tips

There has been some buzz running lately on various tech blogs, regarding the best ways to get "social-enterprise" tools adopted faster and more easily. When it comes to wikis, various tips and tricks are suggested (amongst which my favourite is "if you don not want to end up disappointed, do not start") but there is room left for another list. At least this is what I will be arguing by doing in the following.

Get Things Off To A Good Start

• Give your wiki a soul: this may look like an odd advice, particularly in a corporate setting, but it is maybe the most important one could ever give you. Think about any successful project you lead: which one did not include the strong sense of a shared purpose? Starting a wiki makes no exception.
• Refer to the wiki: if you actually expect your people to go and use the wiki, make is as well known as possible. Encourage its adoption through an intensive internal referral campaign. Clearly stating that you will not read any attachment which has not been uploaded on a wiki page is a good idea to begin with.
• Do not start from scrap: asking people to actually edit pages instead of only reading them is a concept weird enough to get to grasp with, do not add the burden of having to create your own pages (at least at the beginning). Think about putting most of the currently available material on the wiki and even start stubs for pages you feel like they deserve one.

Help Your People

• Train them: there is some hype going around, which basically says "one should be able to use any piece of software without training". ... How many hours have you spent figuring out how to use less than 10% of MS Excel potential? A wiki is not complicated to use, but one should always remember this does not mean that everybody was born knowing what to do with one. In fact, most people were not.
• Provide fast and relevant help: the one thing more annoying that a software that you cannot get to work properly is a software that you cannot get to work properly without knowing why. Whenever something does not go as well as expected, provide a resourceful help center. One that actually knows what your wiki software is, for example.
• Listen to your users: elementary? Yes. Done? ... When it comes to a new technology adoption, providing more support than necessary is a necessity. Feedback is always useful: it tells you what actually does not not work and makes user feel they are listened to. Tip: if you decide to take action from these premises, it is even better.

Keep The Wiki Going

• Go through the "start effect": after the buzz and enthusiasm following the launch of your corporate wiki, an after-shock state is likely to happen some way or another. This includes the 3-days period when no ones writes anything and the "what's new" page looks like your fridge. Do not be afraid to wait a little, things need time to get on the right track.
• Hire a "wiki gardener": during the beginning, information will be added in places seemingly chosen randomly on the wiki. To sort things out and give coherence to the whole, consider assigning this task as a mission to somebody. It will make a huge difference if the wiki can be browsed easily.
• Find out why this generic checklist did not work for your company: this would be my last reminder: every company is different, and implementing a coprporate wiki will hence trigger problems that are quite different too (depending on your enterprise culture, work habits and management staff...). Find out how a wiki could work for you, not how it ought to work for somebody else.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

PS: For those of you who wonder why I stopped at 9 rather than going all the way to 10, it is mostly because I felt like 10 was too short to provide enough advice on the topic.

My Desktop Is My Wiki

Wondering about what my next post would be about, I realized that I was using my wiki in a way that could be worth testing by some other people. Basically, it is about gathering all my sources of information in one place, creating links between them and tagging pages, too. There is a blog to keep my customers up-to-date about market news. Add the fact that I can access my hosted wiki from anywhere and it looks pretty much like the perfect solution for a consultant.

Gathering Information

On of the most important aspects when you are an independant consultant is to be able to process loads of information coming from a great number of places and transform it into valuable pieces of advice. In order to do so, I use a RSS feed reader embedded in one of the pages of my wiki. My three other e-mail accounts have their pages, too and I can access them directly through wiki pages. Whenever I find something interesting, I can add it to an existing page or create a page specifically for it (eg, I have a specific page for every key corporate wiki company). Somewhat like a private Wikipedia...

Creating Relationships

Then the next step is all about creating relevant links between the various topics I may have encountered. I link people to the companies they work for, I assess trends on pages and link to the individuals that took a prominent part in them. I create tags to label all the pieces of information I will have to use in order to carry out one of my projects properly. The wiki backlinks feature always lets me know where I come from while the integrated search engine makes the retrieval of information obvious. Then, once information is stored, broken in manageable chunks and classified, I use the calendar to keep a track of what I have to do and whether I made progress.

Communicating With My Partners

While I am working on a given project, I open its dedicated space to my clients so that we can work collaboratively and exchange information easily through attached files. I discovered recently that I could display MS Office documents (such as PowerPoint Presentations) directly in wiki pages after saving them in html, and this is simply great. My clients do not have to open attached files any longer to find out what they deal with since their contents are displayed direclty on the page. I can export wiki pages in PDF too, and this is often useful to send bits of data in e-mails. Last but not least: I get a RSS feed from any tag I want, which is quite useful when it comes to following specific projects.

Basically, I can get all my information from wherever I am, provided an internet access is available. And guess what? I have not forgotten a file for a long time by now...

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis And Contemporay Trends In Human Resources Development

About all of the world highly-developed countries boast a service-based economy. This means that western companies' most valuable asset is their skilled worforce. Investing in people's talent is maybe the soundest strategy ever - yet few enterprises are actually doing so. How could wikis help reverse the trend ?

The Wiki Way Of Doing Thing

The central tenet in the way wikis work can be summed-up in one word: collaboration. Wikis encourage people's participation through their mechanism of easy page edition. They foster collective creativity by letting people create a coherent result from many small, individual additions. By the very way they work, using wikis in your company is a testimonial to your staff that you believe in their potential.

Empowering People

One of the most tricky issues enterprises are faced with is the matter of life-long learning. How do you get your staff to keep itself up-to-date and aware of a constantly-moving business environment ? A wiki offers an elegant solution to this question : first, it provides a place where information that would have otherwise disappeared can be stored. Working in a Wikipedia-like manner, inside your company, a wiki can offer a base for shared knowledge amongst workers. Second, a wiki is user-enriched; from this follows that all the little bits of knowledge that are spread amongst employees can at last find a place to be expressed. More information available for a responsabilized staff: this is what wikis can do.

Providing Flexibility And Freedom

Another important evolution taking place inside the corporate world is the shift towards an increased place given to part-time and remote working. Wikis provide a useful and easy to use tool when it comes to coordinating the work of people working from different places, at different times. By providing a durable place where information can be added and structured, a wiki allow your company to provide its staff with more opportunities. Let them work when it is easier for thel to and see the global productivity of your company boosted.

What should you remember ? It is, basically
That modern HR trends are going through wiki.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A Wiki To Get Customer Feedback

Ever dreamt of a place where the people who buy your products could tell you what they actually think about them ? A place that would help you increase customer satisfaction, enlighten consumer needs and give the market what it is looking for ?

How could that work ?

The rationale behind such a wiki goes as follow : first, a wiki is a place where people can easily share and discuss information. What's more, people are always lookig for a place where they could tell brands what they think about what they are doing - and find out what others say, too. A wiki would provide your brand with an interactive place of reference for customers looking for more than usual corporate websites.

Ever thought a FAQ was not enough ?

Most users of your products do not know that they could use it for much more than what they currently do. Just think about iTunes : how many interesting features are you not using ? A wiki would let you create an interactive FAQ wher people could share tips about what can be done with your products, and give your company more space to build clever FAQ and how-to. The era of the notice silent about the very point you are wondering about just vanished.

Collaborative Product Design

The last part of this evolution could take the form of a wiki where engineers could suggest new products and instantly get feedback from potential clients. Designing specifications with the help of actual end-users : what better way to keep in touch with the market requirements ? Your customers could be your greatest fans, just let them express themselves !

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC