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.

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. Part 1 looks at how the company decided to use a wiki. In Part 2, below, we see how the wiki was introduced to employees and teams, and how it has helped connect people in the company’s headquarters, manufacturing plant, and project sites around the world. The complete case study is also available on Geometrica’s web site. – Stewart

Implementation

There was some initial resistance among the quality committee to using a wiki: worries about vandalism, poor editing and lack of control. Other objections came from ingrained perceptions about the necessity for sequential authoring-editing-approval-publication, and from the perception that when a document is published, its information is correct, complete, permanent and authoritative.

The wiki destroyed these objections quickly.

The committee empowered all its members, and later the whole company, to edit any document. The distinction between author and editor disappeared, as changes to documents appeared immediately in all company locations, including our headquarters in Houston, the plant and offices in Monterrey, and jobsites as far away as Spain and the UAE. The quality of the information improved and continues to improve with most edits, for many reasons:

1. Ease of access means that users check the wiki frequently to learn more or verify their knowledge.
2. More people get involved with much less effort. In the “old way”, either non-core people aren’t involved, or, if they are involved they spend lots of time in QA process meetings that mostly don’t relate to their work — a huge waste of time. A wiki allows non-core people to pay attention to just the bits they care about. Now multiply that time saving by the number of people in the organization!
3. Ease of editing simplifies “minor” corrections and improvements that might otherwise be ignored because the errors were “tolerable”. The people who know a topic detect shortcomings and correct them immediately.
4. The aggregation of many small corrections and improvements results in very significant changes: “wiki magic”.
5. Information is not repeated. The ability to include and link to other wiki pages allows information to be maintained in a single location. Note, however, that this requires careful oversight of the system (informally known as “wiki gnoming”) as there is no built-in mechanism to avoid repetition of information.
6. Incentives prompt positive cooperation of wiki users:
   • Every user works for Geometrica and is identified by name and password.
   • All changes to the wiki, as well as authors and times, are logged. The information is available to all through a page-history link, and to the administrator by user or date.
   • Changes to any, or all documents may be monitored by any user through email or Real Simple Syndication (RSS).
   • One rule: no rules. Anyone can share ideas, discuss, comment, change, edit, copy and paste as needed, since all the organization is working towards one goal. Everyone’s skills and knowledge are welcomed.
   • Reverting to prior versions of a document is easy and quick.
7. Having managers from different areas working together on wiki documentation created a multidisciplinary approach that enhanced learning and interaction throughout the organization.
8. In our implementation, we utilized a database of “bugs” and “corrective actions” based on the open-source “Bugzilla” software (2). Originally developed to debug software, we found it ideal for debugging documents, complementing the wiki. Bugzilla helps capture the knowledge of individuals who would not normally contribute to the wiki, either because they do not use computers in their job, or because they don’t feel sufficiently confident about a certain change to make it directly on the wiki. Those individuals use the database to report bugs, which are then automatically assigned to department heads. The department heads then moderate structured, asynchronous discussions when required, discover root causes, and implement corrective and/or preventive actions right on the system (Per ISO 9001 Section 8.5.), but with hot-links to the affected documents for quick verification and audit.

In less than one year, the Geometrica QMS wiki has amassed 1577 pages of high-quality documentation containing over 3GB of data. Pages have been edited an average of 12 times, with 12 pages being edited more than 100 times. Thirty-six individuals have contributed to the QMS wiki, with the average having contributed more than 400 edits.

Example: Geometrica Continuous Improvement

The wiki process is best illustrated with an example, and the history of our “Continuous Improvement” procedure serves this purpose (in a pleasantly recursive way). The following images are not intended to be readable, but show how the form and length of the procedure change through time and wiki magic. A wiki page for this procedure was created on May 21, 2008. On June 15, it had been edited a total of 15 times, and by October 8, 30 times. Then there was a furious spurt: 112 edits in the next 8 weeks, for a total of 142 edits. Since that time, the page has been edited less than once per week.

Image © 2008 Geometrica.