| Company: | Geometrica |
| Location: | Houston, Texas, USA |
| Purpose: | Develop ISO 9000 Quality Manuals |
This case study examines a wiki implementation that was built to meet a specific business need, and in doing so provided a focus for a company-wide collaboration project.
Houston, Texas-based Geometrica engineers, manufacturers, and builds dome-shaped and space-frame style structures around the world. Although the company was confident of its quality control procedures, its clients were increasingly insistent on ISO 9001 certification. The company’s policies and procedures were already documented in various electronic and hard copy formats, but these documents had been developed on an ad-hoc basis in response to problems, client demands, and training needs. There was no single approach or cohesive structure.
Having identified the business need to obtain the ISO 9001 certification, the company’s first response was to set up a committee to write a traditional quality manual. As the committee emailed back and forth word-processed drafts, edits, comments, discussions, agreements, disagreements, meeting minutes, etc., it became apparent that the procedure was “horrendously inefficient.” The process itself became a big part of the problem: conflicts about documents, typos, clarifications, and the organization of the information required substantial editing, even for documents that had been considered complete.
In short, their efforts to create a quality management system were disappearing in the email inbox. At this point the company started looking at wikis.
The main aim of the wiki project was to develop a system centered on the organization as a whole, not around a single person or department. The whole organization would provide feedback and shape the documentation so the end product reflected what the organization needed, not what one individual or department believed was best.
After investigating various wiki platforms, the Geometrica team selected the ProjectForum wiki – a wiki specifically designed for small to medium-sized collaboration teams – based on ease of installation, maintenance, and usability.
As with many implementations, the wiki team initially faced resistance and skepticism based on worries about vandalism, poor editing, and lack of control. Other objections came from ingrained perceptions about the necessity for a sequential author, edit, approve, and publish process and the perception that when a document is published its information is generally believed to be correct, complete, permanent, and authoritative.
Once people started to use the wiki to achieve a common goal, these objections quickly disappeared. The whole company was empowered to edit any document. The distinction between author and editor disappeared as changes to documents appeared immediately in all company locations and job sites. The quality of the information improved and continues to improve. Geometrica CEO Francisco Castano cites the following reasons for the wiki’s quick acceptance:
Even with such wide acceptance, the Geometrica team also acknowledged that not everyone was comfortable editing on a wiki, and given the geographic diversity of staff working on various construction projects, some people didn’t have access to computers.
In those cases, Geometrica decided to let these individuals use a bug tracking database, normally designed for tracking software development bugs, to report “bugs” (i.e., errors) in the documentation. These bug reports were automatically assigned to the department heads, who moderated discussions as required and were responsible for implementing any required corrections in the wiki.
Within less than one year, the wiki had amassed 1,577 pages of high quality documentation containing more than 3 GB of data. A survey conducted at the end of 2009 revealed that each wiki page had been edited an average of 12 times, with 12 pages receiving over 100 edits. 36 people out of a staff of 100 contributed to the wiki, with the average user contributing more than 400 edits.
The main focus of the project was to assist the company in gaining ISO 9000 compliance. According to the ISO 9000 Council website, creating and writing an ISO 9000 compliant quality manual from scratch can take up to two years. Using a wiki, Geometrica completed the project in nine months. Once in place, the wiki helped Geometrica meet several different criteria in the ISO 9000 standard including the following:
The wiki continues to be an information source for Geometrica and is central to the company’s philosophy of continuous improvement.
[This case study is based in part on notes from “Using a Wiki to Implement a Quality Management System”[Castano09] by Francisco Castano, Gerardo Mendez, Julio Ayala and Linda Day, which appeared in Quality Digest Daily, October 2009. Extracts from that article are used here with permission.]