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Community Of Practice
Table of contents
What is Community Of Practice?
Community Of Practice is a card from the Team Tactics deck by Pip Decks.
Solve problems, promote best practices and develop people’s skills while retaining talent. The primary output is knowledge created through connecting people with similar interests. Communities are usually formed by discipline, such as Content Design, Engineering, Delivery, etc.
Works well with Daily Sharing, Design Crits and Retros to kick off conversations.
When to use Community Of Practice
- Teams working in silos with little cross-departmental communication
- High employee turnover due to lack of engagement and development opportunities
- Need for rapid skill development in response to market changes
- Desire to implement best practices across teams
- Challenges in problem-solving due to isolated expertise
How to use Community Of Practice
Set up your community
- Clarify who the community of practice (COP) is for (they tend to be organised around a discipline); boundaries help people feel safe. Use Lean Survey to discover people’s needs.
- Get Buy-In from teams/managers who could otherwise prevent people from coming.
- Find a regular time for people to get together; often every one or two weeks works well.
- Run an activity in the time you have together. There are a number of things you can do in a COP:
- Share your current work obstacles to allow the group to help troubleshoot it.
- Learn a new skill or methodology together.
- Talks on useful lessons you think might help others.
Keep it running
- Invite other disciplines, and use a shared space to store your communities of practice outputs.
- Use Agile Comms to promote your community.
- Do a Lean Presentation in an all-team meeting of things your COP has learned or discussed.
Tip: keep going! Some weeks you’ll get only a few people and others lots; it takes time to establish.
