This is from Jason Rothbart of GroupSwim. Be sure to check out their on-demand collaboration tool. It includes a wiki, groups, discussions, and file sharing, and will help you better organize and manage projects, streamline collaboration, and inform & involve your team. – Stewart

Projects of all kinds usually involve writing requirements or designs of some kind. The requirements define what is being 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 project requirements.

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 requirements eventually get done, but not without a significant waste of time and level of frustration

This process, which I’m sure we’ll all agree, is far too common and both costly and painful. People 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 project requirements using a GroupSwim wiki is a perfect use case. It addresses the problems I mentioned above, and yields measurable benefits:

1. It is easy to develop a living template that can change dynamically as the team 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 and what specific changes they made

We have one client working with Ford that is using the wiki to draft requirements. They created a template, use it to start new requirements documents, and then work collaboratively with the clients to fill them out and update them. The permissions are tuned so only the appropriate team members have edit access to the specific wiki pages. The project is very efficient, and the customer is very happy to have full visibility into the process as it unfolds. They are now using wiki pages for other project deliverables like meeting notes, testing plans, and other important documents.