Name: B. Practices
Email: bestpractices@library.ca.gov
Department:State and Consumer Services, State Personnel Board and California State Library
Category: Customer Service and IT
Idea/Initiative Name: Best Practices Website and Wiki
Goal: To create an online site where state employees could share best practices in the areas of Customer Services, Green California, Human Resources, and IT.
Description: A small, cross-agency project team was formed to develop, market, and maintain a best practices site. The team consisted of people from the State and Consumer Services Agency, State Personnel Board, CA Department of Food and Agriculture, CA Department of General Services, Office of eServices and the CA State Library. The team worked on the project for a little over year starting out by meeting monthly and as the launch date grew closer, meeting weekly. Originally, the team was only going to develop a web site, but one of the members suggested using a wiki for the best practice entries, so the team switched gears and developed a site to give information about the project and a wiki to house the entries.
Results: The site was up and running by early April. State employees were excited and were quickly adding content soon after the site and wiki went live. The site and wiki have received rave reviews from around the state.
Lessons learned::
- Plan for twice as much time as you think it will take to get the project off the ground!
- Market! Market! Market! Start marketing as soon the project is being developed.
- Some of the hurdles we faced:
- Finding a host for the site
- Developing the initial content for the site
- Learning how to create and edit wiki entries
- Fitting the work on the site into already busy schedules -- everyone on the team volunteered their time and effort to make the project a success
- What we did right:
- Executive sponsors were identified to support the project early in the project
- Identified someone to act as project manager
- Remained flexible and modified the project as needed
- Were respectful of others’ ideas and opinions