Last week I put a cal out on ActKM for those interested in joint developing a set of Project Management templates to be used in a wiki and I am now putting the call out here too.
There are a few reasons I think wikis would be a good tool to manage projects:
- In small businesses especially, the large PM tools are way too expensive. Using Creative Commons we will make these templates free for anyone to download. All you need is a wiki to install them on.
- Project Managers in general seem to be more of the box ticking type than the Barak Obama social types. As Sonal Shah points out in this nice blog post, Project Managers need to communicate more.
- Many of the documents are of a collaborative nature anyway. Stakeholders especially can benefit as a recursive process of creation for the requirements document tends to jog the mind and uncover needs in respond to other stakeholders points. erfect when stakeholders are on different continents or cannot meet for other reasons.
- The social nature of wikis means your team can work collaborative way. It traditional, highly siloed projects, the team members can see what the other parts of the project are up to, and in more modern projects, the Project Manager can encourage collaboration, especially around interface points.
- Finally, the visible nature of the wiki means that not just Project Plans and Status Reports, are visible, but also the project process itself. People can see what comes next and make more holistic decisions.
7 Comments
I actually created a FAQ yesterday in our Evaluator Resources space on how Confluence could be used for PM.
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Again, great post!
Cheers
Matt
(Twitter: @mattnhodges)
Great idea, we have been playing around with some similar ideas in our team wiki (hosted in SocialText), although none of them have gone to the depth your ideas do.
I'm keen to help out where I can.
cheers
mick
I will go through the Atlassian resources, they look good Matt. Lets touch base when you return from leave.
Good to have you on board Mick.
My ideas so far are to use Wiki Templates for the documents from the PMBOK Framework and then use the page structure of the wiki space itself as the methodology.
What we really need to get started is an Open Source guru to help us set it all up. I'm pretty sure this will need the proper application of creative commons or gnu licensing from the beginning so it remains in the public space.
(P.S. this is all part of Cory Bank's drive to create free KM tools by sharing and collaborating - like we tell everybody else to do!)
That's a great idea.
I have used Confluence as a project management tool in my ex-company and is actually in the midst of developing the same thing myself.
I think having a set of wiki templates will definitely valuable for all of us pushing for wiki adoption.
I already have a confluence instance up and running. We could use it.
Cheers
Might have to check this out for future reference.