Bp8_2009101_Web2.0_Confluence

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you a project I am currently working on. I have proposed the use of Confluence an enterprise wiki solution to improve the process of creating training materials to include collaboration. The diagram below describes the current training manual production process. It takes roughly 6 months to a year to complete this process, and is usually described as painful.

The process involves the author writing the training manual then sending it to the training and development department who edits it and then hands off the document to peer reviewers. The peer reviewers create separate word documents called the peer review document, which contains their comments and suggestions. They send the document back to the training department who concatenates the peer reviewers’ documents, formats the manual and send it back to the author to respond. The author looks at the peer review documents and the formatted version of their manual and updates the manual. When the author is finished the document it is sent to the training department for final publishing.

Figure 1 illustrates the current process for updating training manuals. Where M stands for manual version, P is peer review and SME means subject matter expert.

The problems encountered using the process illustrated above are:

· The process of converting the authors’ document to final PDF is long and results in a number of mistakes that result in rework

· Peer review comments took approximately 6 weeks before being returned to the author. However the average time spent by peer reviewers with the document was three days.

· The peer review form is tedious and only facilitated one-way communication from peer reviewer to author.

These issues with this process all stem from the non-collaborative nature of the writing a training manual. I suggest the use of wiki for authors, peer reviewers and training department people to collaborate to create a training manual. Investigations of the wiki tools available lead me to Confluence©. Confluence is an enterprise wiki solution that can be easily implemented

· Wiki based manuals draw on the community as a source of knowledge. The responsibility of producing quality materials is shared.

· It facilitates scalable collaboration between a few subject matter experts to company- wide collaboration.

· Wiki is an enterprise solution so data can be stored behind the corporate firewall

· Updates are easy to incorporate and can begin during software development stages. This gives the company the possibility of releasing training materials with the product.

· Training materials have several output formats such as xml, pdf and html to facilitate in publishing the manuals.

· Authors can track changes and the author’s of the changes. There is also ability to set up a change management workflow. For instance if some one proposes edits the author can accept or reject them

· Confluence has versioning control the author can roll back to the best version of the document

· Confluence also supports the additions of videos, pictures and metadata

Figure 2 illustrates proposed process for updating training manuals using Confluence ©.

I have suggested the use of Confluence for developing training materials at my place of work the pilot started October 26^th 2009. Since my companies version of confluence is proprietary I can’t share pictures of what it looks like. I hope you enjoy his post