After every project, every big milestone, we learn a lot of best practices that can change the way we work. One of the biggest challenge in adopting these best practices is consistency. Although, these are “best practices”, they often end up being discontinues after a certain time. The percentage of what we we learn to what we retain/implement is very less.
For example, we all know and we can list out many best practices when it comes to Design. But the perennial problem with design is how up-to-date is the design when compared to the actual code. How may Project plans lie in our desktops which are outdated even before it is published? What I am coming to is not a new concept, but a simple yet very effective and the much needed one – “Being Live”.
In my last project, keeping in mind the need to updated, we moved to confluence (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/overview) – simple, yet effective means of collaboration.
We’ve been maintaining our project artifacts on confluence, including project plans, software development plans, risk management etc. And I must say the results are really positive. The never ending, “lack of information flow” is now almost not heard of…