Collaboration Wiki Case Study
Challenge
This large biotech company had over 500 scientists and engineers across the world who needed to collaborate on new projects and products, including new innovative ideas that might be patentable. They needed some group collaboration software that could handle a secure database of confidential information, that required little training.
Solution
CPO Consulting was originally asked to develop a Microsoft Access database for new research and development (R&D) ideas for a team of ~50 scientists. After listening to the customer needs, CPO Consulting’s team recommended using a wiki instead as an online collaboration tool for the “Idea Tracker”. Atlassian’s Confluence wiki was chosen as the best wiki, and the project started small with just this one sample wiki application.
Within a few months a larger R&D business unit adopted it for all of their projects wiki, and CPO Consulting provided a framework, spaces, and onsite Confluence training for using a wiki software for collaboration. It employs a number of plugins, both third party and custom plugins, to provide a rich number of collaborative communities. All research material and research ideas are stored within this simple wiki software. Ideas for new products are submitted, evaluated, voted on and tracked through to the prototype phase of production. Now they are following some of the best practices for wiki adoption for all of R&D to help drive scientific collaboration across all sites.
Benefits
New ideas are being tracked in the “Idea Trackers” with the businesses using the collaboration wiki as a tool to help make the entire business process around Intellectual Property more effective. The R&D teams are using the wiki to help run more effective meetings, and are using it for their document management system wiki. Customer interviews, photos, specifications, videos, project plans etc. are all stored in the online wiki, resulting in fewer emails with large attachments. There is more transparency and visibility across sites and businesses as this has been adopted as the new enterprise project collaboration software.