Another Enterprise Blog and Wiki Success Story from Traction – Shore Bank

In my last post I wrote about an Enterprise 2.0 success based on deployment of Traction TeamPage at NHS Orkney in the UK. Here is another example. Shore Bank is a Chicago-based community development and environmental bank holding company. They started using Traction TeamPage informally for ad-hoc threaded discussion, document sharing and editing, and as a channel for external RSS feeds.

After some initial success with more informal usage, Shore Bank’s IT department aligned the hybrid blog and wiki features of TeamSpace with some of their business processes for more formal business process integration. ShoreBank uses a milestone project management process for its IT efforts. They choose to transition the support for this work process from e-mails and a tracking spreadsheet to the wiki. Pages containing milestone profiles, requirements and organization charts are edited over time and displayed wiki-style. They also use blog features as items such as Status Reports flow through the system based on a blog style time order. I have written how MIT Sloan uses blogs for project management. Some other organizations such as Novell R&D use wikis for their project management. The Shore Bank is interesting by comparison, as it optimally leverages blog and wiki features, within the same framework.

It works like this. Milestones are all defined and assigned a milestone specific profile label, a manager label, a status label, a start date and a due date. The associated communication is all tagged to the relevant milestone label or (if a page, like a status report or issue relates to more than one milestone) labels. With 75 or more active milestones at any time, e-mails about them would result in unusable spaghetti-like discussions portioned into silos. Instead, content or activities for each milestone are on a common, easily accessible page. Milestones can be viewed in terms of one or more of the following: status reports, meetings, requirements, questions, and issues.

The IT Projects overall Newspage provides a dashboard view of all activity, organized by content section in the main body. The Newspage also offers the ability see what is happening for any given label. You can drill down for the details. This type of system can be a huge time saver. Al Essa, CIO at MIT Sloan, estimated that his deployment of blogs for project management gave him back 60% of his day by making project monitoring more transparent. It also makes status meetings more productive for everyone as they can come to these sessions fully briefed in advance. The usual in-person updates can be bypassed to go directly to discussion on next steps. Jordan told me about a similar time savings at the Department of Defense which implemented TeamSpace and achieved a 75% reduction in time spent on status reporting. The Department of Defense also reported a 50% overall reduction is time spent on managing electronic communication after adopting the TeamPage platform.

In The Shore Bank example, they were also able to export the TeamPage status content into their familiar spreadsheet format for explorations during the meeting. The system has now been in place for a year, helping to establish a searchable archive for their efforts. As of this time 136 milestones have been completed while another 40 are still in process and 19 are not yet assigned. These efforts can be sliced in a variety of ways such as issues, managers, timing, to get a better handle on what has worked and where the concerns might reside. Beyond organizational announcements, RSS feeds and IT Milestone Management, ShoreBank plans to expand the use of this system to other project groups outside of the IT department. It makes for another useful Enterprise 2.0 success story and it will be interesting to see how it migrates further across the organization. enterprise blogs enterprise wikis web 2.0 enterprise 2.0 business blogs enterprise social media