One of Alice’s older blog posts over at InternetBasedMoms Experts blog caught my eye recently. It was titled “How Outsourcing Can Affect Your Retirement“.

Retirement? I love what I do and the thought of retirement only crosses my mind only once in a blue moon. Yet, I know it is unrealistic for me to expect I’ll be working forever. Doesn’t mean I won’t try but that’s another story. There will come a point when I am unable to work. That’s why all through 2008, I started documenting everything I do – putting ‘systems’ in place.

In doing so, I’ve also discovered a problem. You see, I love to write in my Word Processor. I like the thought of nicely formatted documents, neatly printed and binded which I can pull out to refer to regularly. You bet, I still do a lot of things on paper. Particularly reference documents. But paper system has one fatal flaw. Great for businesses with a physical office. Not so great when you’re working virtually like many of us do.

This realization hit me hard when I had to instruct my assistant who lives 50 miles from me. That is not a short distance but far enough I cannot have her in my office everyday or even once a week. It needs to be online.

I tried to create PDF versions of the documentation, but that only generated more work. Making the PDF and uploading is not the problem. Keeping track of all the PDF’s and referring to them was beginning to be a major organization issue. My instructions also sometimes come in video format. I could of course create a page to list all the links out but if I was going to do that why not just create the whole system online? It’ll…

• Save me from keeping copies up to date
• Save me from doing work twice – enter information once and everything is there to share

I tried many ways and almost built a WordPress powered staff-only site just to manage all this which is not a bad idea. That may be the next one I’ll try if this one doesn’t pan out. However, my desire to not have yet another script to manage or upgrade stopped me. Right now, I believe a wiki will work best for me because:

• Wikis are editable if I give users the ability to. If an assistant changes a password they can just enter it there and I or anyone else on the team can pick it up without constantly emailing each other.
• It is easy to create and link to different Wiki pages
• Wikis are pretty easy to use
• Staff can add, update or contribute information to the wiki. I can get them to help me create the systems by documenting the work they do work for me. When they leave to pursue bigger and better things, I already have documentation in place to pass on to new recruits.
• Also… doing this means, I’m not the only one who’s generating this internal knowledge base.

If you’re interested to try out wikis to manage and share your systems internally, here are some places you can get started.

• Pbwiki
• WetPaint
• Wikispaces
• Google Sites – this is what I use since I’m already using GoogleApps which makes sharing and permissions a snap.
  

You can also run them on your web host – I prefer not to do this because I’ll have (yet) another web site and script to manage.

• DokuWiki
• WikkaWiki
• PmWiki

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