Nate Nash, a friend who works for, “a largish, publicly-traded, professional services firm” has shared some of the best advice from his experience leading wiki adoption in his organization. He highlights both the pitfalls and best practices.

Last week I wrote about the pitfalls. Now let’s look at the practices that can make your wiki a success!

Start With What You Already Do

When you start using a wiki, use it in the most obvious way – for what you already do every day:

Start with a discreet, flexible, and relevant business process – If you do nothing but have meetings, keep the minutes in the wiki.

Meetings are an especially good place to start. Plan agendas using a wiki, then record minutes & notes, and action items. Between meetings, you can update the status of items, and this sets the stage for deeper wiki uses, like project management.

Go Viral

Go viral – Adoption of a wiki is best achieved when predicated on a “want”, not a “mandate”. Avoid mass communications and anything that sounds non-exclusive. While this can be a slower method for implementation, the results are a much more entrenched and vibrant community.

The biggest drag on traditional enterprise software projects is the method many organizations use to implement them: the mandate.

The problem with mandates is as soon as the initial push is over, usage often drops, especially if people don’t like the tool being mandated.

A more effective method is to start with a small pilot group. This gives you a chance to spend a meaningful amount of time working with them to look at their existing work habits, develop ways to use the wiki to simplify collaboration, make tasks and processes more efficient, better documented, and faster, and ensure lasting success.

Once you help that first group to success, they’ll tell their friends. Viral, word-of-mouth, peer-influence is a much better motivator for people than feeling that they’re being told what to do. What’s more, it builds a network of people who support each other, which helps increase satisfaction with the tool, reduce the time it takes to solve small problems, and even reduce the load on your IT department’s support staff so they can focus on more complex issues.

Invite Senior Leadership

Find a high-level, well-respected leader and implore him/her to begin using the wiki ASAP. Contributions from management will bolster the rank and file to participate.

Grassroots is the best way to kick off wiki use, but you need to show senior leadership what’s happening in order to build their confidence, and allay any initial fears or doubts, and get them involved. Involvement and buy-in from senior leadership adds legitimacy to the wiki, and enables better connections with rank-and-file employees that can excite and inspire both.

Find the Champions

Keep an eye on updates and learn who is not only active, but qualified. Encourage them off and on line to continue and mentor others.

This is key to building the network I mentioned above. Some champions will emerge from your initial pilot, and even more will emerge as use spreads virally. The champions out in various departments are akin to a political campaign’s Precinct Captains: they’re your eyes and ears on the ground who know the people around them best, and know what motivates them.

By All Means, Practice What You Preach!

If you are advocating use of the wiki for collaboration on a new policy or procedure, and still emailing attachments, you are sending the wrong signal.

If you advocate wiki use, make sure you’re an active wiki user. Your own use doesn’t have to be perfect, and you should be exploring new uses along the way, but the bottom line is that you must set an example in order to inspire and engage others.