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WikisForProjectManagement
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesThis is probably the most common use of wikis. Projects or labs often have have a variety of project documents; announcements, to-do lists, status summarizes of various subprojects, documentation, meeting agendas, or hints and resources for others in the project.
Without wikis, nothing on a project site can be updated without the webmaster.
The result is often stale, out-of-date websites, and the real business shifts to email lists. By allowing project documents to be jointly maintained by the whole group, wikis remove the webmaster bottleneck.
This sort of wiki is often access-restricted (or edit-restricted) to those in the group.
Best Practices
Pick a theme from the ThemeGarden appropriate to your project.Use Day Pages, e.g. 2006-11-25 for two things:
- as a journal for who-did-what on what day, and
- to store ToDoList items for events which must get done on or after a certain date. You can also use day pages as an informal time tracking system.
You will very often want project wikis to be non-public via passwords or on an intranet-only server.
Do not use future day pages for the main schedule of the project, because when the schedule slips, moving all the text around will be a huge hassle. Use a separate page, e.g. ProjectSchedule with headings for the dates.
If something should go into a progress report, drop it into the page ReportItems. Or you can mark a paragraph with this symbol and the person writing the report can search for the symbol.
Put a link on the main page or every page, Today which edits the today's day page. In Oddmuse, use the "today" module and say "?action=new"
Use the ToDoList symbol to mark things that need to get done. You could have two symbols for "A" list and "B" list type to-dos. A manager can search for the symbol and prioritize items, or a teammember can search for it when he or s/he has available time.
When the item gets done, move the text to "Today" (without the ToDoList symbol of course.)
Encourage everyone to write ToDoList items and leave them anywhere in the system - they don't have to go on exactly the right page.
Store information needed by the team - usernames, URLs, IP numbers, mount points. This often looks good in tables. Do not store passwords there, though.
If you do something that you want to document OR there is even a tiny chance you might do again, copy and paste the text to today's Day Page. If it gets used again, search for it and move it to a page with an appropriate name, and leave a link to that in the original Day Page.
On the FrontPage, put several useful pages, e.g.
- ProjectSchedule
- A search to show all ToDoList items
- A search to show all ReportItems
- A "collect" action for the day pages to show the project journal
- instructions encouraging people to use the search box