ProjectManagement

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Extending a WikiAsPim into ProjectManagement or as a Group Information Manager might be possible through the use of personal and group categories and BackLinks. It differs from BarnRaising in that it is not so much a WikiCommunity drawing together and doing the work as a external community using a wiki as a tool to collaborate.

Some partially remembered premises for team training, facilitation, and group project management are:

Organized group interactions require development of a shared understanding of mutual goals.
Projects should be formed around specific goals with a plan to end with the goal satisfied
Progress is important
Specific assignments/expectations for specific people help ensure progress

Working with the above premises, I was experimenting with a wiki for ProjectManagement on my own little PIM wiki, http://www.maplepark.com/~drf5n/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?ActionItems , and found the following concepts interesting for developing a wiki Group Information Management system:

ActionItems? -- A table/list of What, Who, and By When items, typically developed during an ExampleProject? meeting
SamplePersonToDo?, SamplePersonDone? -- Tags to provide for searchable tasklists by SamplePerson?
AnyoneToDo?, EveryoneToDo?, UnassignedToDo? -- Tags for ActionItems? assigned to unspecified people
CategoryOpenProject?, CategoryClosedProject?

Example

ActionItems? (a searchable term for open action item lists http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?search=ActionItems )

What	Who	by When	Notes
Write this page	DavidForrestToDo?	Now	[search:DavidForrestToDo]
Ponder about this on WikiAsPim	DavidForrestDone?	Now	[search:DavidForrestDone]
Comment on ProjectManagement	AnybodyToDo?	2005-03-31
Consider your life	EverybodyToDo?	2005-03-24
Review CategoryOpenProject? items	ManagerToDo?	2005-03-25
Write report on CategoryClosedProject?	ManagerToDo?		[search:CategoryClosedProject]
Shovel out the Agean Stables	UnassignedToDo?	ASAP

-- CategoryOpenProject? or CategoryClosedProject?

Alternative Solutions:

[Trac] is a kind of wiki based project management tool. From the front page, it customizes a wiki and incorporates Subversion and an issue tracker.

Atlassian (no link, jfgi) is another corporate wiki type that has some excellent project management stuff rivalling some of the top commercial project management apps.

Is the use of a Wiki as a Group Information Manager or ProjectManagement interesting? -- DavidForrest

Athough our organization has settled on the glossy [TWiki] as a wiki platform, it seems there is a still a need for more structure. Maybe a different wiki would provide such structure, but due to inertia, switching to a different wiki would be difficult. On first glance, the two wikis mentioned above each seem like a TechnologySolution, where all that might be needed is a few concepts from above and a bit of adaptation on the part of the users. I'm not sure that with a community of people selected for other than wiki-community related reasons can develop a stable wiki culture, but I do think that a wiki can fit in and supplement a pre-existing culture if viewed appropriately.

One can view a collaborative network of people as a group that works towards and shares a common goal (some discussion at SuperordinateGoal). Taking the goal as prime, a group of people form a network to work towards the goal. Taking the group of people as prime, the shared goal that they all work towards may end up being a very weak goal that is the least common denominator of the people's goals. A WikiCommunity is a network of self selecting people that find some common thread worth supporting in the Wiki. With a pre-formed community, such as a work-group, there might be a predefined goal that a wiki may or may not help support.

Maybe there is something interesting in contrasting a WikiCommunity and a MeatSpace Community? -- DavidForrest

CategoryCollaboration

ProjectManagement

Example

Alternative Solutions:

Discussion