What’s the biggest reason that people don’t do things?
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More Profit in Less Time - The Wednesday Tip
The biggest reason is that “they don’t know how”.
How do you make beans on toast? You probably know already! How do you make a lemon meringue? If you don’t know, you go and look it up in a recipe book, or on the internet. And that’s the principle that we all need to follow, whether we’re in business, or following a hobby or past time. If we don’t know, then we have to look it up.
And what if nobody has written it yet? Well then, you have to write it. And where should you write it? In a wiki. Because a wiki is always there, no matter where you are.
I have 3 wikis which serve 3 different purposes.
Personal - my sideline as a speaker, and how to keep tabs on things in my private life - like programming the video recorder at home. This one also doubles up as my CEO/brainstorming wiki when I am tracking ideas that I am not yet ready to introduce to the SMT in my business.
SMT (Senior Management Team) - How we control Proactive. Strategising, planning, IT, HR and billing issues. It also contains reminders for mundane things like which font face, colour and size we use, and how to consistently get the same drop shadow and effects on our publications and marketing material.
Staff - The Operations Manual. A compilation of everything we do and how we do it. There’s even a process which tells us how to set out a process on a wiki page!
The reason we have an operations manual is to ensure that we have a consistent approach and deliver the same service to all clients in the same way. That came about because we would only occasionally incorporate a new company for a client, and in the early days, each time we did it we followed a different process and even charged different prices for the same service. Nowadays, things like that are standardised, even if they happen only on an irregular basis.
We started our Operations Manual years ago, and it was a 300 page Word document that only one person could edit at one time. Now that it’s a wiki, it’s available to all staff all the time, and of course, each page can be edited independently.
The transition to a wiki started with a hosted solution from Zoho. We moved to our own in-house system at the beginning of 2009 and tried out four of the free products on the market. We settled on Dokuwiki. It’s easy to use and the syntax took only two days to get used to. And coincidentally, the back end uses text files and not the customary MYSQL. We didn’t choose it for that reason, but actually, that makes it a great solution for people who do not want to use Zoho, and who don’t know how to use MYSQL. And if you don’t know how to do something, look it up on your new wiki!
I’ll be at Wiki Wednesday tonight in central London, if you want to hear more!
Posted on 7 Oct 2009 by Proactive Paul
Tags: dokuwiki, getting things done, operations manual, productivity, wiki, Zoho
