A Commentary on the Ingenix Project
By Richard Tait
I was involved in supporting the Ingenix team as it developed its PDLC process, supplying insight where there were knowledge or information gaps, sharing best practice insights tools and templates, and providing ongoing planning and facilitation support.
As a result of my involvement, I have become intrigued by the potential of wiki technology in the product development area. The power of the technology to ease the management and administrative overhead that can seem so burdensome – in both creating and using the process – is dramatic. I think the reasons for this are many, among them the fact that wiki technology – with hypertext links – is incredibly easy to navigate through. The simple structure of the web pages created with wiki technology makes the whole process feel clean and uncluttered.
The technology also makes it easy to accumulate and organize huge amounts of data in one place. For Ingenix, the wiki became a one-stop shop for virtually everything associated with the PDLC (work process flows, deliverable templates, decision process descriptions, meeting design templates, model documents, completed examples, threaded conversations, etc.). If printed out, this repository would stack up to many hundreds of pages. The interlinked structure of the wiki organizes this mass of data in a way that is intuitively obvious to move around in so it does not seem at all overwhelming, especially compared to the feeling that would be engendered by a 500-page manual sitting on a desk. Users look only at the piece they care about at a particular moment and can ignore all the other pieces – until they're needed.
And finally, the rapid response of the system and tools makes for an extremely smooth collaboration process, both during development and afterwards for use on new product development projects. In fact, when I watched the Ingenix staff using the completed system, the ease of interaction and working collaboration I witnessed was almost magical.
I came away from this project feeling like an evangelist for wiki technology as a key enabler. It offers advantages that every product development organization could capitalize on without a huge investment of resources.
