I’ve seen wiki’s used before in organisations but never really recognised their elegance and beauty as an asset library tool until I was recently assigned to help an organisation achieve CMMI maturity level 2 for its 16-strong development team.  Hammers, nuts(!) and plenty of pain came to mind when I started to think about how a small team would realise CMMI.  The company, Hornbill Technologies are the development organisation within a larger group (Hornbill), and for their part they focus on developing enabling technologies for use by the wider company, they turned out to be a revelation and a revolution in my own view of Wiki’s.

But first a small (groan!!!) digression.  If you view the SEI’s published data (CMMI® For Development SCAMPI Class A Appraisal Results 2010 Mid-Year Update) on the size of organisations achieving CMMI ML2 its clear that globally 25 or fewer employee size organisations represent a reasonable percentage of SCAMPI A’s (17.3%).  As far as my experience of organisations going for a rating here in the UK, this seems to be very high – if anybody out in the blogosphere has an alternative experience then please let me know.  So now back to the Mills & Boon stuff….and onto the first encounter!!

Requirements – and it proved to be a fine example of the wiki at work.  Requirements are being developed and status tracked using the wiki.  Just so we are all working from the same page I’ll introduce a definition of a wiki as a website of typically inter-linked pages that allows users to collaboratively create and edit web pages using a web browser.  So control of the content sounds as if it may be a problem but the wiki tracks page changes and automatically notifies changes to the page to the requirements stakeholders.  Pages can be protected too, so that read only access is granted to all users except administrators.  It also facilitates the capture of review comments and any associated actions and captures commitments.  Traceability is built into the requirements through hyperlinks to the business requirements and/or Change Requests and specifications.  When the requirements are baselined the pages are protected.

So why is the wiki used extensively at Hornbill?  Gerry Sweeney, the founder has been driving the wiki as the medium for knowledge management within the company for a number of years and it is now culturally embedded (institutionalised!!!).  So it was quite natural to use the wiki for any record keeping and information dissemination that helped with Hornbill’s CMMI journey.  The wiki provides a fast and easy way to document and communicate process assets and its collaborative nature is ideal for facilitating the quick capture of ideas, comments and updates for process improvements.

If it was a large organisation it may just have been a wiki brief encounter but for a smaller organisation it was a Casablanca moment (“Of all the bars…..”).