Facilitator Toolkit for Building and Sustaining Virtual Communities of Practice

The boundaries of a Community of Practice (CoP) have changed significantly because of changes in organizations and the nature of the work they do. Organizations have become more distributed across geography and across industries. Relationships between people inside an organization and those previously considered outside (customers, suppliers, managers of collaborating organizations, other stakeholders) are becoming more important. In addition, organizations have discovered the value of collaborative work due to the new emphasis on Knowledge Management—harvesting the learning and the experience of members of the organization so that it is available to the whole organization. This chapter offers a practical toolkit of best practices, tips and examples from the authors’ work training leaders to launch and sustain a virtual CoP, including tips for chartering the community, defining roles, and creating the culture that will sustain the community over time.

Building a Community of Practice

This chapter looks at the work of a team of remote workers and how they have developed into a Community of Practice (CoP). It explores the roles that technology and communication methods have in the formation and development of the community. In telling the story of the progression from a team of individuals to a CoP, the chapter provides a practical guide to others wishing to do the same. Two aspects of the work of the team are considered in depth: • Building communication systems across a Distributed CoP • Building commitment, ownership, engagement and focus in a Distributed CoP The team and community on which the chapter is based is one of some 20 people working remotely for Ultralab, a learning, technology and research centre in Chelmsford, UK. The work of the team is online facilitation for the National College of School Leadership (NCSL). The team meet together approximately four times a year, using an online community space, the Facilitators’ Forum, as their day-to-day working space.

Building Sustainable Communities of Practice

The authors have both been involved as designers, producers and facilitators of CPsquare’s Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop (www.cpsquare.com). Through that ongoing exposure to learning and leading in Communities of Practice (CoPs), they became convinced that stories about CoPs play a crucial role in motivation and learning for community leaders. Within communities, the swapping of stories is a means by which local theories of cause and effect are developed and contextualized. These stories provide powerful ways of invoking context, of framing choices and actions and of constructing identity (Bruner, 2002). From the context of a Community of Practice (CoP) concerned with the cultivation of CoPs, (i.e., the Foundations workshop) there is strong anecdotal evidence that stories are of equal value to practitioners and researchers alike. As part of an extended research activity, and parallel to this growing conviction about stories, Stuckey analysed the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) raised over six iterations of the workshop. The ten most frequently asked questions became the basis of semi-structured interviews held with the developers and managers of the communities described in this chapter. The chapter presents the essence of seven community cases and is intended as an enticement to explore the full case descriptions and community stories (which are beyond the limitations of this printed publication) at http://www.cpsquare.org/cases/.

Best Practices

Organizations continually look for ways to do more with less. One of the most important methods today for helping improve the company bottom line involves linking experts in Communities of Practice to find, share and validate best practices, ideas and solutions. This chapter examines how several best-practice organizations select Communities of Practice, provide support for their ongoing work, develop specialized roles to sustain their efforts, and use technology to bolster the rich tacit knowledge exchange offered by these entities. APQC has also developed a list of critical success factors for Communities of Practice and questions to help organizations develop those factors from its research on Knowledge Management over the last eight years.

Viable Communities within Organizational Contexts

This chapter is about the question of what creates and sustains viability in Communities of Practice (CoPs) embedded in an organizational context. Experience with successful CoPs at Siemens AG has shown that even though most of them differ greatly from each other in many aspects, they all share five common factors that are necessary for the viability of a CoP. These five factors are introduced in the following pages. They represent an approach that can be used to analyse and improve CoPs that do not seem to be viable and as a guide for CoP members and moderators to maintain viability in their own CoPs.

Trusting the Knowledge of Large Online Communities

The phrase “leading from behind” is borrowed from group analytic theory, an important branch of group psychology. For some, the phrase may be pejorative: an effective leader is normally in front of group members, not taking a position behind them. However, for large online Communities of Practice, leading from behind and trusting the group is an important strategy. This chapter focuses on how a leader develops the capacity to trust the group. Recognizing that groups of people are powerful and creative organisms that can be trusted is difficult for a leader. For Freud, who thought of groups as unthinking, primitive mobs and for modern managers, who are taught the value of using teams with specific objectives and limited life spans, the idea of unstructured, dispersed collections of people making decisions or taking action is an anathema. Learning to trust the knowledge of a large group takes training, practice and courage. We ground our conclusions in an empirical analysis of the leadership of one large online Community of Practice. Using archives of discussions among community members, we develop leadership principles that support the “leading from behind” approach. We use these data to suggest how managers can lead online communities to form the trusting relationships that are essential for effective knowledge sharing and innovation.

Extending Richness with Reach

In an effort to replicate Communities of Practice online, organizations are investing in Information Technologies that create intra-organizational electronic networks, or “Electronic Networks of Practice”. These networks are designed to enable the creation of electronic “bridging ties” between geographically dispersed organizational members to provide a communication space in which individuals working on similar problems may quickly ask each other for help on task-related problems. This chapter compares the dynamics of knowledge exchange between Electronic Networks of Practice and traditional Communities of Practice. In addition, this chapter examines why people participate and help others in the network, as well as whether participation has an impact on knowledge outcomes and individual performance. In order to investigate these issues, data were collected from a successful electronic network at one of Europe’s largest consulting companies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the results and implications for both managers and researchers interested in the dynamics of electronic knowledge exchange.

Building Customer Communities of Practice for Business Value

Most discussions of Communities of Practice (CoP) place them in the context of a primarily internal-to-the-organization approach to managing knowledge. The construct, however, has application across the entire value chain of an organization, including the domain of a company’s customers. This article explores the strategic value of building Customer Communities of Practice (CCoPs), learning networks among customers of a company whose win-win value proposition helps customers gain valuable insights from other peers while also providing the sponsoring company with a means to further innovation, loyalty and deeper insights into the markets they serve. The analysis suggests three types of CCoPs, including business to consumer, business to business, and communities of channel distributors. Case studies of each are presented and an especially extensive treatment is offered of the second type based on the author’s experience of building a CCoP for his own software company. The discussion concludes with several lessons learned and practical guidelines for building successful CCoPs in any industry.

Cultivating a Public Sector Knowledge Management Community of Practice

ActKM is a Community of Practice for people interested in public sector Knowledge Management. Having begun in 1998, the community now numbers more than 550 members and is nurtured and maintained predominantly, but not exclusively, online. Utilising the Cynefin sense-making framework (Snowden, 2002a), this chapter analyses the ActKM community and provides a practical account of its history, purpose, guiding principles, goals, characteristics and dynamics. The chapter concludes with a summary of the lessons learned from the ActKM experience that others might find useful in cultivating a vibrant Community of Practice of this type.

How Information Technologies Can Help Build and Sustain an Organization's CoP

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are seen as a primary vehicle for knowledge sharing across large and disparate organizations. It is therefore expected that technology will play a critical role in enabling global CoPs. The usefulness of Information Technologies (IT) to support CoP activity in two large, but quite different, global organizations is analysed and common themes developed. BHP Billiton is one of the world’s largest diversified resource companies, with a strong industrial heritage and a mix of blue and white collar workers and levels of IT literacy. CSC is one the world’s leading IT service providers, with a highly IT literate staff and a relatively sophisticated IT support environment. Both organizations could be considered early adopters of the CoP concept. This chapter tracks their evolution and the lessons learned along the way. The common themes arising from comparing and contrasting these two experiences mostly reflect the socio-technical challenges faced when enabling CoPs by the use of IT. In both organizations, the adoption of the newer collaborative tools is slower than anticipated, with the tried and tested face-to-face, teleconferencing and e-mail alive and well. The rule of people first, technology second is reinforced in both organizations. Technology adoption was far more successful as a response to CoP demand than a technology push. Where technologies are deployed, the level and degree of support was critical. The commitment of CoPs to a particular tool is fragile and easily lost through inconsistent performance of the technology. As well as facilitating CoPs, IT also plays an important role in developing measures and metrics for supporting CoPs as a value adding business resource. The ability to digitally track CoP activity provides an additional value-adding role for IT. While the usefulness of IT to support CoPs has largely been oversold in the past, BHP Billiton and CSC are two organizations that have persevered and learned from their respective experiences, to the extent that IT is now playing a key role in sustaining healthy and valuable CoP programmes.