Software in the Workplace

I use Microsoft products 5 days a week and I’m not sniffy about them… but I do swear at them constantly! I believe Microsoft’s software division motto is “Never let good enough be the enemy of shipped.” (To say nothing of the design department’s altogether more simplistic motto “MORE WHITESPACE!”)

100%. In fact… 200%. Outlook is a dumpster fire on Windows. Teams slowly gets worse but started out in a decent place.

But to the OP’s issue, it took me years to get my team of 6 (including me) to buy into what we call our “wiki”. It did actually start as a (text-based) wiki, but later migrated to OneNote for simplicity. This repository now includes over 600 articles, at last count, that cover just about everything we do. From team contact details, to timesheet codes, to how complex (software) processes work, to what goes wrong from time to time and how to deal with it, to ‘backgrounders’ on various technologies and tools we use, to hints and tips, to common issues we see that we can reassign to others without delay, to all manner of other stuff.

Apart from sheer persistence, the following helped me get it accepted:

  • As soon as I found one other team member who appeared to “get it” I gave them some more in-depth tutorials and went out of my way to be helpful to them in getting the hang of it.
  • When anything came up that should have been documented in the wiki, I made mention of it in the team chat. Every time.
  • When I quickly solved a problem by referencing any content already recorded, I exclaimed how easy it had been. Every time.
  • When someone was crowing about having figured out something complex, I would mention it would be a great idea to get it in the wiki.

And so on. Eventually each team member began to get actual value for themselves out of it. Once that had happened for a bit, I was seeing new content appear without any prompting. It still took me a while to get some people to do a decent job, though I accepted that sometimes, a quick “memory dump” was a useful starting point. (Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.)

Now I can hardly keep up with the changes and no-one ever mentions the wiki except to reference information in it, or occasionally to ask “why isn’t there something in the wiki about this?” which is usually followed by an apology from someone for not having got around to it.

In summary, make it part of conversation every single day and make sure everyone has an opportunity to see the value they can derive from it. And it’s very much an “attack in depth” (to adapt a phrase) to get the message across.

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