97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 25. Use a Wiki

Adrian Wible

WIKIS ARE A GREAT MECHANISM to centralize access to your project information. Hopefully, the wiki will be updated multiple times daily and will always be open in a window on team members' desktops.

To prevent you from wasting any precious brain cells that may be needed for the actual project work, I've provided some suggestions for pages you might include on your wiki. While creating these, you are sure to have ideas about customizing the site for your own software project:

• Stakeholders. Have space for topics such as up-to-the-minute project status, short-term issues, long-term issues, risk, budget tracking, and milestone achievements.

• Developers. Add information such as the connection string to connect to the QA database. Fellow programmers won't wasting time trying to locate the code from other random sources. Team members can share information on topics like coding standards, build and deployment procedures, common pitfalls, and use of advanced coding techniques such as dependency injection.

• General information. The software project manager should add the help desk phone number, team roles and responsibilities, and individual team member contact information here.

• Team calendars. Use this site to post team calendars. One great trick is to use an embedded iFrame pointing to a Google calendar.

• Meeting minutes. Archive meeting minutes so the team can easily ...