How the pre-park opening show at Disney World helped me professionally – Part 2
This is a continuation of the previous post.
That night at the hotel I was lying in bed thinking about the day. Not only did I love Splash Mountain (we did it 3 times), I was thinking about the show. The script kept coming back to me and I thought, we really need something similar for our purposes. I got up and jotted down a few ideas: First meeting script, email announcement template, catalog naming conventions, basic permission sets, etc. What I did was think about what were the repeatable tasks faced by team.
When I returned from Disney, I began working on a Word document called the Account Manager Manual. I started adding anything that my team did to it whether or not I knew all of the info. There were placeholders galore, but that was OK. It was just a list of things that needed to be added. My vision was each team member would have a copy that they could refer to at any time. I searched the office and my email archives for content. There were tons of emails that people had sent at one time or another that was trapped there in someone’s email. Anything that fit the “repeatable” criteria was added.
Quickly the document grew to 20 pages. Then 30. It started to approach 50 pages and then I began to have problems with formatting. If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft’s Styles features, you know what I’m talking about. I quickly realized that I needed a better solution. My first thought was Sharepoint, Microsoft’s intranet in a box solution. I was never a big fan primarily because our search capabilities didn’t work. So, finding anything was next to impossible.
After consulting with a few other people, the idea of a wiki was proposed. After some research (thank you Wikipedia) I settled on MediaWiki, the same software that runs the aforementioned Wikipedia. Our infrastructure guy installed it, gave me the admin login and said, go to town. And I did. I spent a few weeks converting everything I had accumulated. I searched more email. I played with ways to organize the site. In due time, I had over 100 pages. Then I started talking it up to people.
When people asked me a question, I jotted it down and made sure it was on the wiki. If someone asked a question that I knew the answer was posted, I didn’t answer but referred them to the wiki. I started sending emails saying, “so and so asked me about XYZ. Did you know that the answer is on the wiki. And, by the way, you can also learn ABC while there”. A few people got tired of me constantly saying, “Did you check the wiki?” but my goal was to embed it into the culture of the company. It took time, but eventually everyone knew about it and I knew I won when I heard someone else say, “Did you check the wiki?”
When I left, there were close to 1,000 pages of information. Uses of it spread from reference material to schedule planning, project management, FAQs, capturing ideas, using it for newsletters, and more. Our sales staff was using it as a repository for RFP responses. The content development team used it to schedule their upcoming workload. Product management used it to create release plans. Client services used it as a checklist for emergency response to application downtime. The uses continued to grow.
I learned that you could collaborate with others very easily. Everyone could have the same document with all updates at the same time. Information was publicly available. I learned that you could communicate very effectively through the tool. Posting information was easy and literally anyone could do it.
A simple script for a Disney show inspired me to implement an infrastructure where colleagues could share information, document processes, write newsletters, capture business critical procedures and catalog knowledge that had previously been in someone’s head. Personally, I’m proud to have added something significant that helped not just me, but just about every user within the company.
