I started a new job this week. I will not reveal who it is with except to say that most people who read this blog will have heard of them. My team is newly created, although some of the work we will be doing was previously handled by other teams. After some investigation it turns out there wasn’t any documentation for the work that the other teams were previously handling. So one of my first jobs is to start documenting the use of some of the scripts and utilities we use.
As a new team there aren’t any standards for documenting our team information. My manager put some of his thoughts forward about how he thought it could be done. Whenever people start talking about sharing information collaboratively I start thinking about wikis, so I asked my manager, “What about using a wiki?” “What’s a wiki,” he said.
I found myself thinking about how to easily explain what a wiki is. Firstly I tried my usual response, “have you used Wikipedia before?” “Nope,” he said. So I did my best to explain to him what a wiki is. In the end my manager said it sounded like it was a good idea, but he wasn’t too sure about anyone being able to edit everything. I said, “its no different to the bunch of Excel and Word files currently stored on the server.” “True,” he said, and plus I reassured him we can always rollback changes if required.
I was fairly sure in such a big organisation there was a decent chance one of the other existing teams might already use a wiki. So I started searching around and sure enough there was Atlassian’s Confluence wiki (again) already setup for around 30 teams and waiting for my new team.
There are several sceptics in the team so together with another team member I have taken the role of championing the new wiki and justifying it to our managers. It will be interesting to see how we go but I am sure with common sense and Confluence on our side there is no way we could fail.
