How is the Wiki Format an Improvement Over E-Mail?

The wiki is an improvement of traditional email communications in 4 areas:

It automatically keeps everyone involved in the project in the loop. Often times the biggest problem a project runs into is lack of transparency and communications. If things are being discussed and agreed on between subsets people without the entire knowledge of the group then the level of clarity and accountability goes down. Having everything posted in an online forum eliminates that. We’ve seen clients that have had internal problems with things getting done (over years) – immediately have them corrected when they started using our system of transparent tracking on the web.

The ‘key person’ problem is eliminated. The second biggest issue a project often runs into is that knowledge gets segmented or controlled by a small group or a single individual. Once again by rigorously having everything posted on the web site in a centralized location this problem is also eliminated. PLUS – if anyone new in the future comes into the project they have a chronological listing of all the events and items covered with regards to the system and they can go back and use that as a resource to build up their own knowledge.

Going forward it helps to diffuse the knowledge gained by each individual out amount the group PLUS it can bring many more eyes to bear on a problem. If someone at your site sends an email to one of our techs as an example – then only that tech and that person will be trying to solve it. By automatically having everyone brought into the process many more people are able to comment and suggest solutions – and most of the time this results in FAR IMPROVED solutions. As they say 2 heads are better than one – and many are better than 2. At most of our sites the site admin, the IT people and the dispatch supervisors are all part of their wiki group. When someone learns something they all learn it. When someone has an idea – they all can comment on it and help improve it. I have heard countless positive comments from our users when they see this result from the process.

Questions only have to be answered once. As in this example I posted this online. All our staff will have access to it and if asked in future about the benefits of the wiki they’ll have an immediate place to go and be able to answer the question in seconds. This vastly improves productivity and frees people to be able to focus on new challenges as older ones are solved.