How to Collaborate Effectively?

Projects of all kinds usually involve developing a strategy, writing requirements or designs of some kind. The requirements define what needs to be done, how something should work, how the customers will use it, etc.. These are critical documents that can make or break a project. More often than not, multiple people contribute to these projects and strategies.

The usual process teams follow is:

1. Someone on the team develops a template in Microsoft Word or Excel
2. They post it somewhere or email it out to the team
3. Each requirement document becomes a separate file that the team sends around via email to complete
4. The documents eventually get done, but not without a significant waste of time and level of frustration

This process is both costly and painful. Users experience issues with version control, email problems, software issues, etc. But there is a much better way!

While many people know what a wiki is, few use them effectively in the course of doing business. Developing corporate strategy or project requirements, using our True Reckoning Confluence wiki are perfect use cases for how we can maximize collaboration and buy in. Enterprise wiki adoption can address the problems mentioned above, and yield measurable benefits:

1. It is easy to develop a living template that can change dynamically as the team refines the strategy or learns on the project (this always happens)
2. Version control goes away because each document only has 1 copy that everyone uses and shares
3. There are no software issues because everything is done using a browser
4. All versions are saved so it is easy to revert back if necessary
5. Documents are fully searchable and you can track who contributed what and the specific changes they made

Our clients are using our wiki environment for strategy formulation, draft product plans and requirements, to track progress, manage sales teams & forecasts, etc. They start with existing templates and then work collaboratively with internal and external users to populate content and update as required. The permissions are tuned so only appropriate team members have edit access to the specific wiki pages. The projects are very efficient, and all stakeholders are very happy to have full visibility into the process as it unfolds.