Interesting Discussion Using a Wiki to implement a Quality Management System (QMS)
- Thread starter Pancho
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Le Chiffre
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Nice video! I still hear people that are amazed that a wiki is this versatile. It ended up being the hub of our entire business management solution.
Regarding the questions about verifiying the wiki: I haven't seen any answers and I am curious how those using a wiki already (and specifically Confluence with JIRA) have validated the tools.
We are using Confluence, JIRA, Bitbucket, and Bamboo (all Atlassian tools). We are at the beginning of our product development so everything is new and we can set things up as we wish. To give Confluence a try, I set up templates for customer requirements overview and use case pages and a JIRA workflow for status/approval. Owners of pages assign a JIRA document issue to the page. That issue is updated to various statuses and the final stage is approval which I automated through the workflow tool (took some doing as we only have Confluence OnDemand so no nice plugins for e-sig).
Besides wondering how to validate it other than setting up a dummy wiki for testing, would anyone who has JIRA/Confluence be willing to take a look at my workflow and poke holes in it from a regulatory/standards view?
And, for those wondering how we are going to capture the design nad records for a specific release, we are putting everything into one "space" and copying then archiving it at release.
This thread gives me hope I can put all the QMS items into Confluence, too. Just want to make sure Confluence/JIRA can be easily validated for use.
Thank you!
S. Schoepel
We are using Confluence, JIRA, Bitbucket, and Bamboo (all Atlassian tools). We are at the beginning of our product development so everything is new and we can set things up as we wish. To give Confluence a try, I set up templates for customer requirements overview and use case pages and a JIRA workflow for status/approval. Owners of pages assign a JIRA document issue to the page. That issue is updated to various statuses and the final stage is approval which I automated through the workflow tool (took some doing as we only have Confluence OnDemand so no nice plugins for e-sig).
Besides wondering how to validate it other than setting up a dummy wiki for testing, would anyone who has JIRA/Confluence be willing to take a look at my workflow and poke holes in it from a regulatory/standards view?
And, for those wondering how we are going to capture the design nad records for a specific release, we are putting everything into one "space" and copying then archiving it at release.
This thread gives me hope I can put all the QMS items into Confluence, too. Just want to make sure Confluence/JIRA can be easily validated for use.
Thank you!
S. Schoepel
K
Krazykev32
Wow Just stumbled across this article. I recently took on a Quality managers role and one of my first tasks (after senior management buy in to QMS) Is to create a visible quality system. One of the Main issues we have as a company is we are very diverse in what we do so no one product is the same. I guess I needed to find consistency in variability.
I'm pretty sure the Wiki can do that for me.
One other question and apologies if it has been covered but I couldn't find it. Can you set up some kind of document approval process in the wiki so that anyone can suggest change but only process owners can authorise the change.
My company was also looking at some massively expensive software that didn't really address the issue that the QMS needs to be accessible or visible to all, It needs to be owned by everyone, and in our case needs to be able to grow and adapt to our business.
Thanks for the awesome article
I'm pretty sure the Wiki can do that for me.
One other question and apologies if it has been covered but I couldn't find it. Can you set up some kind of document approval process in the wiki so that anyone can suggest change but only process owners can authorise the change.
My company was also looking at some massively expensive software that didn't really address the issue that the QMS needs to be accessible or visible to all, It needs to be owned by everyone, and in our case needs to be able to grow and adapt to our business.
Thanks for the awesome article
M
mmagargee
RE: SSchoepel
Regarding your statement "wondering how to validate it other than setting up a dummy wiki for testing," we initially evaluated our Confluence workflows by setting up a dummy space and then just creating a document and attempting to approve the document. As time went on and we had more workflows to test, we began just setting up pages in our personal spaces and then copying the workflows to that space. Our criteria for validation was simply:
1. do the approvals advance the document approval to the next state?
2. what happens to an approved document when further changes are made?
3. how do you exit gracefully in an unforeseen situation?
4. are the right approvers able to approve and are prohibited approvers prevented from granting approval?
5. and finally, is the draft document not displayed unless you click through the revision area to see the changes?
Your organization is going to be far more effective in gaging workflow response than anyone on the outside. Also, while I took a look at using JIRA based workflows, I threw up my hands at the complexity of it and deferred to using a Confluence based plugin: Comalatech's Ad Hoc workflows (their name changed to just Comalatech workflows). As you may be finding, the documentation provided with Confluence and the plugins is awful (I think good documentation is thorough, with definitions, and copious examples--Confluence documentation is scant with a few definitions and application examples for one in a hundred things) so you're going to find that development in largely through trial and error.
Mike
Regarding your statement "wondering how to validate it other than setting up a dummy wiki for testing," we initially evaluated our Confluence workflows by setting up a dummy space and then just creating a document and attempting to approve the document. As time went on and we had more workflows to test, we began just setting up pages in our personal spaces and then copying the workflows to that space. Our criteria for validation was simply:
1. do the approvals advance the document approval to the next state?
2. what happens to an approved document when further changes are made?
3. how do you exit gracefully in an unforeseen situation?
4. are the right approvers able to approve and are prohibited approvers prevented from granting approval?
5. and finally, is the draft document not displayed unless you click through the revision area to see the changes?
Your organization is going to be far more effective in gaging workflow response than anyone on the outside. Also, while I took a look at using JIRA based workflows, I threw up my hands at the complexity of it and deferred to using a Confluence based plugin: Comalatech's Ad Hoc workflows (their name changed to just Comalatech workflows). As you may be finding, the documentation provided with Confluence and the plugins is awful (I think good documentation is thorough, with definitions, and copious examples--Confluence documentation is scant with a few definitions and application examples for one in a hundred things) so you're going to find that development in largely through trial and error.
Mike
M
mmagargee
RE: Krazykev32, document approval process.
I know of Confluence users who set up workflows in a parallel tool, JIRA, and others who use a Confluence plugin such as Comalatech workflows. Our company is using the latter (see post #205).
Comalatech also has a discussion thread going on the topic of ISO 9001 systems, see: https://community.comalatech.com/comalatech/searches?query=ISO&style=topics&x=8&y=11
Regards,
Mike
I know of Confluence users who set up workflows in a parallel tool, JIRA, and others who use a Confluence plugin such as Comalatech workflows. Our company is using the latter (see post #205).
Comalatech also has a discussion thread going on the topic of ISO 9001 systems, see: https://community.comalatech.com/comalatech/searches?query=ISO&style=topics&x=8&y=11
Regards,
Mike
K
Krazykev32
Thanks Mike
Thank you for the help. Mentally I need to back away from the over-zealous controls used at my previous company. It seems that we made things more complicated than necessary.
We aren't able to use some of the plugins since we're in the cloud version but we may be talking about moving to a hosted server version which would, I believe, give us the ability to use "simpler" plugins for features we need (and make testing easier). Right now we have to use the JIRA workflows as that is our only available method for sign-off other than writing things in the comments.
Regards,
SSchoepel
We aren't able to use some of the plugins since we're in the cloud version but we may be talking about moving to a hosted server version which would, I believe, give us the ability to use "simpler" plugins for features we need (and make testing easier). Right now we have to use the JIRA workflows as that is our only available method for sign-off other than writing things in the comments.
Regards,
SSchoepel
Has anyone had a hosted server version of the Atlassian tools where you have the service/vendor do the tool testing and feed you the testing/results so you do not have to do the quality system tool testing yourself?
If so, are you willing to share the name of the service/vendor?
Regards,
S. Schoepel
If so, are you willing to share the name of the service/vendor?
Regards,
S. Schoepel
K
Krazykev32
I have my IT department working on a solution. I have given them a list of expectations. Fingers crossed we get something
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