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Following hard on the heels of 10 ways to use blogs for project management, here’s some thoughts on how we’ve been using wikis in a project management environment.

Planning meeting agendas

The task of planning agendas normally falls to one unfortunate, who’s then bombarded by emails from all quarters. Rather than stand underneath the deluge, why not plan the agenda on a wiki page? Anyone who needs to add an agenda point can do it themselves, adding notes and background information as required — and once the organiser decides that the agenda is set, the page can be locked to prevent further changes.

Then issuing the agenda is a simple matter of forwarding a link — no more bulky attachments to clog up road warrior inboxes.

Real-time minute taking

Taking minutes of meetings, conference calls, etc is vital for project managers — all too often, people’s recollection of what they’ve agreed to is — ahem — subtly different once the meeting has finished. So getting actions down on paper as soon as possible is crucial to avoid actions falling down the cracks. But the problem with minute taking is that you spend the whole meeting writing, then twice as long again typing the minutes up, and then they’re emailed out to the participants and promptly disappear into thin air.

We’ve taken to using a wiki to capture the progress of meetings while it’s still in progress by adding them to the agenda page. As the each item is being discussed, the contributions can be captured — and if it’s a conference call, participants can see the minutes as soon as the wiki page is saved – realtime and online. As soon as someone’s volunteered for an action, it’s up on screen and documented — no room for wriggling!

Wikis are also great if there’s information which wasn’t available at the time, but will be added later. Rather than send out the missing info in an out-of-context email, participants can update the wiki page so that the new details appear in the context of the discussion — and the wiki’s version control allows you to see by who and when the changes were made.

Brainstorming presentations



Collaborative presentation planning can be a nightmare, particularly if there’s more than two people involved. Despite the version tracking functionality of Powerpoint and the like, there are invariably problems as two or more contributors change the content simultaneously.

Rather than use Powerpoint, we now brainstorm presentation outlines on a wiki page. It’s simple to add and change bullet points, drop in new slides or expand on existing ones. There are wiki plugins that allow you to export pages in a format that can then be imported into Powerpoint – just apply the corporate layout template, add clipart, and your presentation is ready to go.

And to take wiki presentations to the next level, why not dispense with Powerpoint altogether? With clever page formatting, you can run the presentation direct from your browser — so no need to distribute the presentation afterwards, just send out a link.

Keep documents up-to-date

Wikis are excellent at version control – it’s built in out-of-the-box. So rather than using file documents and shared drives, why not keep project documentation online and up-to-date on a wiki? If you have documents which are subject to constant change — configuration settings for example — you can easily maintain a wiki page as a single, central source of the up-to-date configuration. And the built-in version control and change tracking make it simple to find out what changed and when.

If you’ve missed the furore of rumours about the possibility of a forthcoming “headless iMac” then you’ve probably been hiding under a rock of late. The Mac community rumour mill has been grinding overtime ever since ThinkSecret – an Apple enthusiast site with a good track record of predictions – published details of what might be a stripped-down, low-cost iMac.

Over the last few days, mainstream media has picked up on the story, and it’s gone pretty much around the world. At which point, Apple have decided to fire off a lawsuit against ThinkSecret, alleging that the rumours contain Apple trade secrets.

Which leads me to two possibilities. Either Apple have a spectacularly clueless and inept legal department, who wouldn’t know brand-enhancing publicity if it fell on them – or they have an incredibly cunning marketing wizard pulling the legal strings to whip up the furore even further.

The chances of it being the second are quite frankly nil, because at a stroke Apple have positioned themselves as the neighborhood corporate thug throwing their weight around in the way we’ve come to expect of petrochemical giants. Which is doubly bizarre when you consider that they benefit from a customer base which tends toward zealotry at times. Although their products are now positively hip – not to mention increasingly cost-effective when compared with a Wintel-based platform – what’s kept them going over the years has been customer loyalty.

Compare and contrast this approach with that of the Evil Empire itself. Sure, Bill Gates is capable of coming out with comments that give the occasional glimpse into the heart of the convicted predatory monopoly, but the public face of Microsoft today has been transformed by people like Robert Scoble, sites like Channel 9 and a whole host of others who are now talking more-or-less openly about what they’re doing and why. You might not trust them or like what they’re doing, but you’ve at least got a clearer idea of what they’re thinking about.

So there’s the paradox. On the one hand, the open and increasingly-cuddly giant that everyone loves to hate, and on the other the secretive and knee-jerkingly litigious underdog that inspires devoted loyalty from its customers fans. Doesn’t make sense, does it?

If you’ve missed the furore of rumours about the possibility of a forthcoming “headless iMac” then you’ve probably been hiding under a rock of late. The Mac community rumour mill has been grinding overtime ever since ThinkSecret – an Apple enthusiast site with a good track record of predictions – published details of what might be a stripped-down, low-cost iMac.

Over the last few days, mainstream media has picked up on the story, and it’s gone pretty much around the world. At which point, Apple have decided to fire off a lawsuit against ThinkSecret, alleging that the rumours contain Apple trade secrets.

Which leads me to two possibilities. Either Apple have a spectacularly clueless and inept legal department, who wouldn’t know brand-enhancing publicity if it fell on them – or they have an incredibly cunning marketing wizard pulling the legal strings to whip up the furore even further.

The chances of it being the second are quite frankly nil, because at a stroke Apple have positioned themselves as the neighborhood corporate thug throwing their weight around in the way we’ve come to expect of petrochemical giants. Which is doubly bizarre when you consider that they benefit from a customer base which tends toward zealotry at times. Although their products are now positively hip – not to mention increasingly cost-effective when compared with a Wintel-based platform – what’s kept them going over the years has been customer loyalty.

Compare and contrast this approach with that of the Evil Empire itself. Sure, Bill Gates is capable of coming out with comments that give the occasional glimpse into the heart of the convicted predatory monopoly, but the public face of Microsoft today has been transformed by people like Robert Scoble, sites like Channel 9 and a whole host of others who are now talking more-or-less openly about what they’re doing and why. You might not trust them or like what they’re doing, but you’ve at least got a clearer idea of what they’re thinking about.

So there’s the paradox. On the one hand, the open and increasingly-cuddly giant that everyone loves to hate, and on the other the secretive and knee-jerkingly litigious underdog that inspires devoted loyalty from its customers fans. Doesn’t make sense, does it?