Using A Wiki, Or Embracing It?

Cormac insisted that we use a wiki in our business. So I said yes. Well we are meant to know about these things, so we should play a bit. And he was insistent – it seemed to be important to him, and if we were going to disagree about something, this was too small. But then I found he wanted me to use it properly. I was using it. I’d develop ideas for something in Word upload the file, and link to it from a wiki page – I’d even provide some context in the wiki page. But he wanted me to write in the wiki page not in Word. Image by Andrew*

Me: Word gives more formatting capability.

Cormac: How much formatting do you need to develop a few ideas.

Me: I am used to using Word.

Cormac: But If you want me to help develop the document I have to download it, amend it and upload it. Seems a bit of wasted effort and time-consuming. Also we'd more than likely run into version issues.

I won’t elaborate all of my excuses and his counters. I ended up doing the wiki thing. But that was not the end.

Cormac: We should create a wiki for our client ASTI.

Me: OK.

Cormac: We should encourage them to use it.

Me: Yep.

Cormac: We should put all of our stuff relating to ASTI in there.

Me: Yeah.....Hold on. What was that!

Cormac: Well, for instance, as we are developing the next workshop we should develop it in there, so they can see where we have got to.

Me: But it will be messy.

Cormac: To a point, yes.

Me: They’ll see our stumbles and when we go down dead ends.

Cormac: Yes.

Me: It’s unprofessional.

Cormac: Maybe by the old way of doing things, but not by the new way. It's taking transparency to a new level. We say that people and organisations have to get use to operating more transparently. We should prove that we know what that means.

That moral argument always gets me.

Eat your own dog food. 

Practice what you preach.

Put your money where your mouth is.

And use a wiki with your client?

Comments

[Igor]

We use Basecamp to communicate with our clients. Most are unfamiliar with it and really like using it with us - they are in fact a bit over-awed with it! I frankly think it's quite basic and would be interested in trying to use Google Wave, after I've read some reviews. But to answer the question in the article - there is a lot of backstage stuff going on before we post anything to a project extranet and we are extemely careful about what materials the client sees from us, and how polished and professional our communications look. Another important point is that usually there are several stakeholders on the same project, even though we are commissioned by one person who is our main point of contact. We often review our findings with them in private to ensure that what we say doesn't ruffle anyone's feathers. It's not polishing the results at all, but one often needs to be very diplomatic, and careful when there are several parties with an agenda to use our research to support their internal case. plus inevitably we come up with something cleverer or better, the more we analyse our findings, so spilling the beans too early won't make us look as smart as we are :) So in short, for our situation I'm with Nick! But I guess if you're working with a single client collaboratively, it could work.