Gerardo Méndez, quality manager at Geometrica, wrote last week to tell me about the company’s effort to use a wiki to document their new quality management system. Geometrica designs, manufactures, and installs domes and space frame structures for environmental protection, sports venues, houses of worship, industrial plants, and educational assembly halls. The company is based in Houston, Texas & Monterrey, Mexico, and has delivered domes on every continent (map).

Gerardo included an excellent case study, and gave me permission to reprint it here. I’ve split it into three parts to be published over the next several days, and the first part is below. The complete case study is also available on Geometrica’s web site. – Stewart

The approach of using a wiki to document a Quality Management System (QMS) may seem overwhelmingly obvious in a year or so, yet we are far from that today. Chances are you’ve used Wikipedia on the web, but you may not appreciate the power that a wiki can bring to virtually every facet of documentation and management systems. This case study describes how Geometrica used a wiki to document its QMS and achieve ISO 9001 certification in “record” time while avoiding the bureaucracy that often plagues this process. Just remember — You read it here first!

The Problem

Documenting a QMS is an intense process for every organization, and Geometrica’s case was no exception. Geometrica engineers, manufactures and builds domes and space frame structures around the world, and although we were confident of our quality control procedures, our clients were increasingly insistent on ISO 9001 certification. Our policies and procedures were already documented in various electronic and hard-copy formats, but these documents had been developed unsystematically to respond to problems, client demands, and training needs. There was no single approach or cohesive structure.

The company’s first approach to documentation followed the old paradigm: Once the decision was made to pursue registration, a quality committee was formed comprised of the CEO, the Vice-President, the heads of operating departments, the quality manager, plus an external consultant. The plan was to proceed in a sequential manner: vision, mission, general production system, quality objectives, organization, and formal documentation procedures, followed by process descriptions, procedures and work instructions, all in the common ISO 9001 framework.

As we emailed back and forth word-processed drafts, edits, comments, discussions, agreements, disagreements, meeting minutes, etc., it quickly became apparent that the procedure was horrendously inefficient — and the job momentous. The process itself was a big part of the problem: conflicts between documents, typos, clarifications and the organization of the information required substantial editing even for documents that had been “completed”. Meetings dragged on to resolve often small wording differences. In many cases, desirable edits would not be done because of the difficulties of keeping track of the latest version of a document while more than one person worked on it, or simply because of the effort required to update everyone’s binder. We attempted to solve the problem by maintaining only a single copy of the documents on the server and in hard copy, but even these were hard to keep in sync.

In short, the letter and spirit of ISO 9001 — enabling a management system — was lost in the in-box. At this point, we started looking at wikis. 

What’s a wiki?

In specific terms, a wiki is a special website where anyone can edit the content, and where every change is saved. A wiki’s advantages stem from key paradigm shifts:

• Wiki documentation can be developed, corrected and improved while working on the processes described, as well as beforehand or after flaws are found. This helps achieve congruence between the system and everyday activities, allowing documentation to remain continually fresh.
• A wiki is a collaborative environment that empowers everyone to take ownership of the process being described, the documentation being developed, and the continuous improvement that is the goal of all quality systems. People new to wikis worry that their use will lead to chaos and poor documents, but the fact is that everyone wants to be at their best when their work is on display company-wide.
• A wiki is fun to use and fosters teamwork.

Here’s what you lose when you move to a wiki: outdated procedures pasted on walls, updates in emails, endless meetings, employee manuals that are never really up-to-date, document control hassles, and document non-conformities.

What you gain is a system centered in the organization as a whole, not in a person or department. The whole organization can provide feedback and shape the documentation to balance personal belief or subjectivity. Documentation becomes what the organization needs — not what one individual or department believes to be the best.

Meister’s brief but accurate description of a wiki is that it’s fast (1), a good fit for Geometrica, where change, teamwork, efficiency and effectiveness are key values. Upper management expected Geometrica’s ISO certification to happen swiftly without slowing the work for our clients, and a wiki made it possible.

There are many wiki engines. The most well-known is MediaWiki, which powers Wikipedia. But at Geometrica, we used ProjectForum for its ease of installation, maintenance and use.

Image © 2008 Geometrica.