Some time ago our team was big, and our projects were small. Whole project scope was fitting into one man's head, each requirement change and each important decision was distributed "from heart to heart", with belief in e-mails.

As projects complexity grew, e-mail box had been flooded, and then the new savior appeared: corporate wiki! We can now store all documents and knowledge in one place! To be precise, in two places: one visible for all participants, and one visible only for top-managers. Well, one way or another. Tasks are tracked in Rational ClearCase by that moment, and we were writing the plan in MS Project. This scheme worked, but there was no integration between these three systems. Decisions made by managers were distributed to the team in the format "real-life meetings + emails". The person who missed the message, lost track of whole project. Client was notified by heroic efforts of team, especially the most miserable person - project manager. He was responsible for creating visibility to the client, in form of different manually generated reports. The amount of systems was changing, but the essence stayed the same: incompatible data and problem of connecting all aspects of a task very quickly.

The issue was aggravated by the fact that delimitation of participants on "thinkers" and "implementers" was not working any more. We had to agree that each team member has needs to:

• Understand the task, seeing whole track of previous decisions
• Make decisions, being able to track connections to other tasks
• See what people are doing right now and synchronise their actions (which leads to process transparency)
• Store and share the results of their work, mostly decisions and the background for decisions.

In knowledge-intensive organisations (KIO), every task and every project is actually knowledge transformation. Knowledge is needed for action, action is creating new knowledge. Imagine you're building a cottege. Say, there's a task to dig the basis. Even such a 'standard' task generates knowledge: which subcontractor fits best, what specific issues were found etc.

Therefore the need in common platform for knowledge appears. There are minumum three processes in typical organisation that are eager to use new tools for increasing preciseness and effectiveness. These are: finances, CRM and production process. And they should be tightly integrated to run good. Big companies use ERP systems as a platform for knowledge-for-action, but what's available for small and medium businesses? Price matters.

We took the idea of connecting task management and ECM (enterprise content management) as a basis for collaboration system. "People and interactions over processes and tools", as Agile Manifesto declares. Meanwhile, researchers say that a knowledge worker spends up to 80% of his time searching for information, and only 20% on actions and creating new knowledge. Thanks Google for resolving this issue for Internet scope, but businesses require something else. The power of business data is in connections between elements.

Connecting people, knowledge and actions to increase the effectiveness of a project or a company - that's the main goal of Comindwork. In such a model, time is a gap between three components, narrowing the gap leads to increase in project speed.


We divide knowledge into several categories, on the criteria of lifetime.
1. Pure todos, tasks that do not require additional communications to be solved. Samples of a todo: "call client", "agree about a meeting".
2. Incidents, cases, action items - knowledge that is collected for a task that will be hardly performed again. A case is actually a history of solving the issue, track of all messages done during collaboration. Samples of cases are: "share responsibility between team members", "create content for site main page", "write business-plan".
3. Wiki pages have the longest lifetime and are potentially the most useful knowledge. They may be used both in scope of single project, or across projects. Often wiki pages are deliverables of a case. Samples of wiki pages are: "list of servers", "marketing strategy", "project plan".

There's a lot of tools to choose from. The main issue is to ask correct questions, and generate answers quickly.