Is Wiki-based Collaboration the Answer?

Situation: Your collaboration tools just aren't cutting it.

The range of SaaS tools out there has expanded way beyond BaseCamp knock-offs to tools that approach projects from a variety of angles. Each tool has its own heritage that’s reflective of what the vendor believes is important.  One interesting tool that I’ve looked at recently is PBworks, formerly known as PBwiki.  Their approach is very collaborative in nature and less structured than most.  By providing easy ways for you to define your own structure, they hope to provide tools you can make fit your work style, versus having to adapt your work to rules imposed by the tool.

We recently spoke with Chris Yeh of PBworks, who told us a bit about their approach to collaboration and managing knowledge.  Here’s what he said.



Q.  You guys firmly believe that wikis provide a better collaboration platform than folder-based file sharing or email.  Can you tell us a bit about why that is? (provide examples if possible)

Wiki-based collaboration provides several major benefits that file sharing and email simply can’t.

First, let’s deal with file sharing.  The issue with file sharing is that it’s difficult to understand how a document has evolved over time.  At best, you might be able to view different versions of the file from some archive.
With a wiki, revision and change management are an integral part of how you work; all revisions are stored, you can see the history of changes with a single click, you can compare any two revisions, and you can always revert back to a prior version.

This kind of flexibility gives people the freedom to be more creative; you can take more risks because the revision history is there as a safety net.

Wikis also allow true co-authoring, rather than simply passing redlines back and forth.  When a group of people works on a document, the asynchronous edits are notoriously difficult to re-integrate.  Usually, whoever is responsible ends up having to read through several different drafts and manually integrate comments and suggestions.

With a wiki page, everyone is always working on a current version that reflects everyone else’s edits.  This decentralized approach saves a ton of time.  One of our customers is Deloitte Digital, which uses us for creating new business plans.  Their CEO, Peter Williams, reports that using PBworks lets them cut down the time they spent on editing final reports by 90%.

With email, the issues are slightly different.  The problem with email is that it’s so easy to lose the context of the conversation.  Most emails are not self-contained; to understand them, you have to read the entire conversation to pull out the nuggets of information that are actually relevant.

A wiki page provides a centralized, authoritative record; it is largely self-contained, and once you read it, you can make a decision or draw a conclusion.

Another PBworks customer is Capgemini, the consulting firm.  They were able to use PBworks to cut down project-related emails by 90% on one of their marketing projects.



Q.  You seem to specialize in certain industries, like creative, legal and financial services.  Is there something special about the ways that people work and collaborate in those industries that make your approach a fit?

We focus on use cases where individual users have to deal with multiple projects and initiatives, and where communications need to cross geographic or corporate boundaries.  We’ve designed our product so that not only can you use hosted wiki pages to collaborate, you can also get a personalized dashboard of activity, tasks, and milestones across all of your different projects.

For example, while designers and lawyers may seem very different, the challenges they face at work are very similar: They are staffed on multiple projects for multiple clients, and they have to keep track of a lot of tasks and information.  Both lawyers and agencies end up using PBworks in a very similar way to manage their client projects: They create new workspaces for each new project or case (using our workspace templates), they collaborate with a project team to get things done, and they track their progress using a personalized dashboard.  Whether you’re building informercial websites like Livemercial, or prosecuting a personal injury case like McConnell & Sneed, the collaboration process is very similar.



Q.  Every toolset has implementation challenges.  What are yours and what approaches do you use to get around them?

One of the big challenges with adopting a broad collaboration platform like PBworks is that there are so many possibilities.  Even I don’t know all of the capabilities of the product, and with our engineering team adding new functionality all the time, sometimes people aren’t sure where to begin.

That’s why we put such a heavy emphasis on certain specific solution-focused product editions, like Project Edition for project leaders or Legal Edition for lawyers.  This allows us to do things like build usage-specific templates, instructional videos, and case studies.

We also back up our product with some of the best service in the business.  You can contact our support team via email, and get a response from a real human being in hours, sometimes even in minutes.  And if you need help getting started, we offer a $100 custom trial package which gets you professional services to customize our product and provide a one-on-one training session.



Q.  A big part of project management is having a high-level view of what’s going on.  There’s no gantt chart view, task dependencies, etc. in PBworks.  Is that intentional or are those features to be added later?

It’s intentional.  We’re big fans of rapid iteration and innovation, so our general approach is to launch a simple, usable product, and build up from there based on feedback from real users.  For example, PBworks started off as PBwiki, a bare-bones hosted wiki.  It didn’t even offer user accounts.  But over time, it’s evolved into a full hosted collaboration suite, complete with document management, basic project management, and even a mobile edition for iPhones and Blackberries.

After we launched Project Edition, we immediately began hearing feedback on issues like task dependencies and measuring resource load.  We’re working on such features, and many more.

It’s also the case that we heard from a number of project managers who thought that the level of detail and customization was just right.  Let’s face it; many projects are not complex enough to warrant a full project management solution, yet are more complicated than a simple to-do list can handle.  PBworks is great for those ad hoc projects that make up most of our work lives.



Q.  What do you feel the biggest challenge in collaboration today (beyond what you’ve addressed in PBworks) and what is your organization doing to address it going forward?

The biggest challenge in collaboration today is encouraging the end user to make online collaboration an integral part of their daily work.  Tools that require users to abandon old but comfortable ways of working, or that require double entry, aren’t going to work out in the long run.
I think that collaboration has a lot to learn from the bottom-up usability of social media tools like Twitter.  These informal and unstructured tools are a great way to handle the initial phases of brainstorming, when you don’t even know the objective of your proto-project.  We’re looking very closely at these tools and how our customers use them so that we can integrate their lessons into our products.
Ultimately, collaboration is about bringing together, people, processes, and production.  Collaboration vendors won’t be successful unless their products can bring together all three of those elements.