For the last couple of months I’ve been trying to reorganize the wiki my software company uses for internal communication. It’s been a rather daunting task, because we haven’t really had any posting rules, so in the truest sense of the word “wiki”, my colleagues & I have just been posting things as we like. So we’ve now got this ginormous (yes, that’s a real word, haha) mess of a wiki that you can’t really find anything on. In October my boss had asked us to take on a “leadership task” that was related to our jobs, but that we weren’t directly responsible for. I opened my big mouth and said that I’d like to reorganize the wiki.
Big mistake.
I kept getting side-tracked by “real” work, and so could never get much done on this project. Add to this the fact that to get any back-end configuration done, I had to put in a ticket with our Systems Administrators, who, being seriously understaffed, never managed to get to my tickets. Since I was usually side-tracked, it wasn’t a huge problem.
Then a few months ago I started seeing articles on Sarah Maddox’s TW blog about using wikis for online help. And so I would always think that I should get back to my wiki reorg project. But then something else would come up, and nothing would happen.
Last week I had a “year end” chat with my boss, and being that this job is still relatively new to me (I only started there in August) as well as the company (they’d never had a TW before I started, now there are two of us!) I was a little nervous. I don’t know about you, but I typically get nervous about these types of meetings with my boss, even though I know nothing bad will happen, it’s just my nature to worry. My boss tells me that he’s “results driven”, and would like to see me finish off more tasks.
Interesting, since most of my work isn’t tied to any software releases like at previous companies, so it’s a tad difficult to sort this out. At any rate, I figured that this was the exact impetus I needed to get my wiki reorg moving. So I attacked it with vigour.
And have made progress! Very exciting.
I’ve completed two out of the five wikis I’ve got to work on, but don’t cheer for me too much just yet, because those are the “small” ones. I still have to attack the ginormous one, but I’m looking forward to it. I took advantage of a new Systems Administrator who hadn’t really been assigned any work yet, and got him to make a bunch of configuration changes that were blocking me. So now it’s up to me to do all the heavy lifting.
But it feels satisfying to have made some progress, and I’ve given myself a target of Feb. 29th to have it all done. Let’s see if that happens.
