Case Study: Financial Times

Global Corporation

The Financial Times is a truly global organization, with staff and partners scattered throughout the Americas, UK, Europe, and Asia. In the past, the Financial Times used extensive email and telephone calls to coordinate this distributed network of people and resources; PBworks is taking the place of this ad hoc collaboration, allowing the Financial Times to manage projects and vendor relationships faster and more efficiently.

Global Coordination

Will Speck, the Director of Business Development & Market Research for the Financial Times and FT.com, had a problem. Working out of his New York office, Will was coordinating projects around the globe, ranging from helping reporters and editors develop new information sources to managing mashups between the Financial Times web site (FT.com) and its various partners. Each time he started a new project or vendor relationship, he found himself going over the same old ground-spending hours explaining projects to vendors, emailing reports back and forth with co-workers, and lamenting the inefficiency of the process.

That's when Will realized that a wiki could help the Financial Times manage this collaboration. Will was an expert on and early adopter of "Web 2.0" technology, including wikis, and quickly selected PBworks.

Better, Faster, more Efficient

The Financial Times uses PBworks as a central hub for project management. At the beginning of each project, team members use the wiki to share information, manage documents, and record conversations. As a project develops, the wiki continues to grow, adding notes, organizing files, and linking in other tools like the company's static intranet and online spreadsheets.

Projects can also become interlinked, allow new projects to leverage the hard-won knowledge of previous projects to do things faster, better, and more efficiently. When a project requires the work of third-party vendors, the wiki really shines, giving vendors direct access to a well-documented project without requiring IT permission or changing firewall configurations.

Organic Documentation

Finally, after a project ends, the wiki provides complete and organic documentation. Will described it as, "a movie about the project." This information, which would previously be lost, lets Financial Times continuously refine and improve its processes. Now that PBworks is an integral part of how the Financial Times collaborates, team members can't imagine doing without it.