Tip6: Don’t rush it.
July 14th, 2010
People will need time to get used to the wiki, and once they do it will grow significantly.
Every team has its own speed
There is no hard rule here. Some teams can get up to speed in a matter of weeks, other organizations will take months to grow into the habit of a successful wiki. I have seen often that people new to the wiki start overly enthusiastic and add tremendous amount of content in the wiki. Only to find themselves out of breath a few weeks later.
Save one page and you got a wiki
Some project and team leaders consider a wiki project as a real 'publishing' job. Including review cycles, editorial guidelines and restrictions on who can say what. Wrong. Very wrong. As soon as one introductory paragraph is written and saved, consider your wiki as 'published'. Now it is up to the team to amend it, correct it and provide structure.
Of course some preliminary ideas on what will go in the wiki will help. Hints to complete topics can simply be part of the pages. This is what makes wikis different from 'documents'. No need to annotate, comment or add revision marks. Simply add [to be reviewed] or [tbd] flags next to topics. Everyone reading the topic will be hinted gently to provide the content if they can. If it is wrong or incomplete, the next person visiting the page can still correct it.
Some people have asked us if it is better to foresee a lot of empty pages, laying out the structure of the wiki in great detail. While that may seem like a good idea at first, it generally isn't. If you create 15 to 20 pages like that, chances are high 5 or more of them will never get filled. They give the wiki a sort of 'Abandoned city' view. By the time the team gets to fill them, the situation will have changed and new insights will have come. You will then end up with a lot of dead end and orphaned pages that remind you how foolish you have been to think that one day some one would fill it.
Better is to write a short paragraph of what you think should be added or detailed. Hints like
- Somebody fill this is...
- To be completed. Pete/John/?
- Should this get more stuff added?
- Somebody amend this paragraph, I am not sure it is technically correct.
- And my favorite: Some inspiration here please! My kingdom for some insights!
Create a sense of urgency
The first of the 'Change Management Principles' of J. Kotter is to create a sense of urgency. We need to act now, or else... While you can hardly extrapolate it to any team deliverable, setting up a wiki certainly falls into the category of 'getting things moving'. Copy&paste some text on the main page, add diagrams and reference to other documents and walk your team through it as though it was a PowerPoint. Make clear it is 'Work in progress', and you rely on the team to provide extra material.
Now what?
You managed to get the ball rolling, the team has relatively well picked up tasks and some material is provided. Now prepare for the long and hard work. The novelty will wear of quickly and if you don't get some critical amount of content in there, the thing will die even before it got off the ground. Relentlessly push the use of the wiki forward, use all other tips on this blog to push it. Prepare for a typical 6 to 8 weeks of getting to some kind of momentum. Good signs the wiki is picking up are:
- Content subsections start to appear without you knowing it
- People start complaining when the wiki is down for 1/2 day or more
- The team is actually pushing you to enter information in the wiki
- A core team of heavy contributors is established
- Your mail volume goes down, especially in terms of attachments
If you have tips on how to take it slowly, let us know...