Why Wiki?

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Why wiki?

Sort of a strange question by itself, but put another way : Why should you consider implementing a wiki when it comes to project management?

Wikis can be great communication and sharing tools, as well as helpful for collaboration on solving problems. But are those good enough reasons to start one? While a wiki has the potential to be a great asset to a project group, there are reasons where you may want to seriously re-evaluate the possibility (for example, there is a certain situation you are trying to address and you think the wiki will solve it). To justify the creation of a wiki, just as with the implementation of any new process or feature, there needs to be a supporting rationale to adopt it.

Content or Discontent
Part of that justification process will involve setting up a method in which to determine if the wiki, or parts thereof, accomplish specific goals. Areas could be designated as deliverable- specific, with success conditional and broken out based on the various elements that comprise a project. Other quantifiers may include soft measurable statistics such as individual member participation (number of posts, amount of content added, replies to other posts and so on) and group involvement (number of registered contributors, how many of those members are adding content, etc.).

And speaking of content, just who will be responsible for …

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