Communities of practice

HP defines communities of practice as informal group of people that cross organizational boundaries and come together to discuss best practices, issues, or skills that the group want to learn about.

Learning is a social activity and people learn in groups are the base of the community of practice.

What is a Community of Practice?

• Group of people informally bound together by shared experience and passion for joint enterprise
• Naturally present in all organizations
• Emerging in importance as an organization convention
• Complement existing structures & galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, & change

Wenger (1998) identifies mutual engagement, joint enterprise and a common repository as the three key features of a CoP.

- Mutual engagement: People join the CoP through shared practices. Members of a CoP are linked to each other through their mutual engagement in work activities.

- Joint enterprise: Members of the community work together in order to achieve a common goal, be it explicit or not, be it officially defined or not. Members of a CoP are engaged in the achievement of a shared outcome.

- Common repository: Over time, shared practices, repeated interactions and the construction of a common history and culture in the community provide more or less material traces of the community. Written files constitute one official and explicit aspect of a common repository. More intangible aspects include routines, rituals, specific idioms.

In 1997, buyers of the SNCF (about 2,500 employees working in local teams) implemented an intranet site dedicated to their work. The intranet has now been fully integrated in their daily tasks. Buyers use the site to order supplies and to get information about their shipments. Use of the intranet has reinforced a pre-existing trend towards the greater centralization of procurement. It has also deeply affected work processes and tasks: purchaser's practices have become more transparent to the other departments and they have reinforced the buyer's awareness of being part of a joint enterprise. Finally, shared sections of the intranet, such as the tracking of procurements and shipments, have enhanced the buyer's professional image.

Before its merger with Daimler-Benz, Chrysler reinvented the way it did business in 1987. With the acquisition of the American Motors Corporation (AMC), Chrysler adopted a new production model based on platform teams. Platform teams are cross-functional teams charged with the end-to-end production of a vehicle. The concept was designed to reduce the time to market for a new vehicle concept by eliminating the stovepipes often found in large corporations. The concept was to reconnect the functional specialists and leverage their creative abilities by allowing them to work together, and create a central repository to capture the knowledge to ensure the use of best practices across the entire organization. The two pieces of the strategy emerged into the current day Engineering Books of Knowledge (EBOK) and the Tech Clubs.

Chrysler's Tech Clubs are the communities of practice that evolved to help Chrysler reconnect specialists from different platform teams. There are two types of clubs in the organization: the executive tech clubs, which are responsible for managing the tech clubs, and the engineering tech clubs that are responsible for managing the knowledge of the organization within their specialty area.

The engineering Tech Clubs are groups of engineers from different platform teams who work on the same processes in their everyday work. The clubs have regular social (and professional) meetings that are critical to sharing and mentoring for process specialists.

The groups meet face-to-face weekly or biweekly to discuss current breakthroughs, debate best practices, manage the EBOKs, and share information regarding future developments. The clubs also act as the governing body for the EBOKs. The structure allows the members of the community to stay in close contact with others who do similar work and creates a knowledge-sharing environment within the organization.

It has provided an indirect mentoring relationship for junior employees and created a knowledge pipeline that will sustain the organization for years to come. This structure has also improved career planning for the tech club members. With the old concept of platform teams, no one on the team could evaluate the technical performance of the employee and provide career counseling.

In the Tech Clubs, at least one person from a platform team must be involved in the club of their specialty. The coordinators are chosen by the executive vice president based on their skills of leadership, networking, organizational knowledge, current community activity, access to management, and technical expertise.

One of the approaches taken by DaimlerChrysler to encourage people to participate in communities is through the annual review process. Each person has two components to their review. The first focuses on management by objectives, and the second concentrates on behaviors and competencies. One of the behaviors/competencies on every employee's appraisal is sharing knowledge and experience. The easiest and most convenient way for employees to accomplish this goal is through community participation.

When communities first begin to form, DaimlerChrysler provides a great deal of training for community members and leaders. The group has created a collection of manuals that are directed at initiating a community. The manuals provide information on how to select leaders, run meetings, and create sample agendas. The training helps to establish the roles and responsibilities for all those involved in the process. Having a clear description of the roles and responsibilities of each member reduces the confusion of determining who is responsible for a task. Training is also provided to help members take advantage of the information technology systems at the community's disposal. Guidelines are established for managing the books of knowledge and how to use the IT tools. There are training courses on consensus, the value of reusing information, and the pitfall of flooding the books with too much information.

Once the communities are established and have begun to generate content for the organization, a set of more advanced training courses help the communities flourish by expanding their size and scope. Members begin to create a system of measures to help chart the progress of the community.

Aside form the training and workshops, DaimlerChrysler supports its communities by providing funding from top and middle management to cover the costs of developing IT systems, deferring meeting costs, and covering the costs of the training.

Communities are an integral part of the DaimlerChrysler business model. They are apparent in the strategy of the organization and its structure and are a part of employees' daily work. The path to an advanced system of communities was not always an easy one. The lessons learned along the way are constantly tracked and monitored to make the next generation of communities more beneficial.

Some of the direct benefits of knowledge management at DaimlerChrysler include:

• a more agile product development process,
• a synchronized production process,
• a standardized customer experience, and
• a governance system that has enhanced co-ordination and created a cohesive culture.

Communities are able to provide these benefits in a number of ways.

• Helping each other solve problems and coordinate decisions by discussing issues within platform development and developing universal solutions
• Building expertise for DaimlerChrysler in critical areas by sharing and documenting lessons learned and identifying best practices
• Keeping up with the latest ideas and technological developments by evaluating suppliers and scanning the external technological developments
• Benchmarking the company's expertise against world-class standards by tracking competitors
• Enabling members to build skills, relationships, and reputation by providing experts the opportunity to network across platform teams
• Making recommendations for formal training and promotions.

Adapted from APQC, E.Wenger & All