Technology Mashup

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems.

When you read some ITT response documents you can see the joins,
i.e. you can see the writing style change when you look at the deferent sections

This is because the bid manager breaks up the response into chunks and allocates a team member to each chunk. The team member then works independently on the chunk. And if you are traveling fast then sometimes its last minuet … the cracks never get pasted over.

I am looking for a better way to create a response document and I think a wiki could be it.

Instead of breaking it up into chunks the bid manager creates a frame work in a wiki, all the team members have visibility of the whole response all the time, they can make changes to any part of the doc.

Bada bing - you have your response doc at the end of the process. It then goes to a graphic designer so that the copy can be typeset.

This is better because

1 Ditch the baton method
Or the “you do your bit” method, which creates a culture of “ive done my bit” rather than “what’s next to-do?”

2 Visibility of everyone  else’s style
When working on the doc you will be able to see what has gone before, this is the first step on the road to getting the writing style in sync.

3 Abstraction of content from presentation

This is the biggest problem with the old word and powerpoint  tool set. Loads of effort is spent mucking round with tables, merging documents, getting the bullet formats right. Content authors should not be concerned with this, they should just say … here is bullet points … here is a diagram. The formatting should be done by the professional type setter, if the content is designed using a wiki then you can export to word/pdf etc and then apply formatting.

4 collaboration with the customer
If you have the response as a wiki, why not share it with your customer? They can make comments directly, they could even be involved in the design and editing process.

5 vitalizing the team

This style of collaboration tool is awesome when you have a virtual team, this could give us a real advantage over our competitors.