Communities of Practice from the bottom up

Floating Network by Anthony Reeves

Today I talked to a good friend with a problem, or more likely problems. He recently conducted several SME interviews for new service level development only to find the SMEs had participated in similar interviews with multiple other teams. Upon further investigation he discovered each of these teams was working on part of a more systemic need at their company. The problem was that each duplicated effort of the others, took up valuable SME time, and didn’t align requirements or scope.  He asked me, “Would running these through as projects help fix this problem?” My answer was it depends...

An effective, mature PMO could certainly help limit the number of similar projects and combine efforts into a unified whole. In fact, that’s an excellent reason to improve project management maturity and create a program or project management office. However, his company has multiple PMOs all of which coordinate through a central enterprise program management office that only exists to monitor high-level alignment with strategic initiatives. This leaves a gap in managing similar objectives for mid-sized and small projects, which is where my friend spends his time. Additionally, silos within the organization and individual managers refusing to accept feedback or suggestions from employees creates a culture of distrust. In such an environment, I don’t believe his problems with duplicated effort can be solved just by creating a project. What needs to happen is a cultural shift in sharing information, specifically information being shared between groups with similar interests and across project offices.

My initial recommendation is to create a grass roots community of practice movement. Yes, this same formula could be used as a top-down initiative, perhaps under a Chief Knowledge Manager or Chief Simplicity Officer (I plan to write more on this when I find my bookmark about a C-level position with lots of power and very little budget who is tasked with finding improvements in operations...I want to give proper credit to the original innovator). However, following a community organization model from political movements might be just as effective and not require advanced sponsor support. Here’s how it would work:

1. Interested parties create communities of practice by networking at the lowest levels in the organization to find groups with similar roles and interests. Ideally these groups should form around topic areas. (These topic areas could later form the core of an enterprise ontology for communities of practice.)
2. These communities of practice then use existing communication infrastructure (wikis, blogs, portals, email lists, or whatever else is available) to discuss possible improvements and form definite objectives for future activities. The objectives are there to help inform decision making when possible. For example, if an objective was implementing a knowledge management system, then the community of practice could advocate for doing so in multiple sites throughout the company.
3. Provide expertise and promote attention with the ultimate goal of showing enough value to the organization that management will want to expand the concept and recognize communities of practice as an integral (and culturally approved) method of collaboration.

Even though it sounds idealistic, there have been a number of times I’ve personally seen major changes in a company as a result of a few prepared individuals who could produce a plan as soon as their manager was ready to listen. Even if you don’t get official support, you could very well find better alignment based only on internal networking and information sharing.