In the previous chapter, we saw how we can enhance collaboration by integrating it with Office services such as Teams, Streams, Yammer, and others. This is collaboration at its best because it’s seamless. You can access the platforms with one sign-in, i.e. the Office 365 SIGNIN mechanism, and discover a unique seamless experience. In this chapter, we are going to learn how SharePoint Communication sites are used to manage multiple communities in order to create a bigger collaborative experience and build a community of practice.
Communities of Practice (CoP)
A community of practice. Image from https://unsplash.com/search/photos/community
A CoP is a group of two or more people who share common interests, issues, goals, and objectives. The group can organically evolve because of the members common interest in the area, or it is created with the objective of gaining knowledge related to a field. As a consequence of sharing information and experiences with the group, the members learn from each other and produce an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally.
A very well known example of communities of practice is the Xerox organization. Customer service representatives traveled door-to-door to repair and maintain Xerox machines and bring business value to the organization. During lunch or breakfast, customer service representatives shared their experience with each other and learned from each other. Further, they were able to implement these lessons in their services. Xerox as an organization found value in these interactions and created a database to share lessons, experience, and best practices. It also awarded customer service awards for their contributions. Door-to-door experience gained by customer representatives was logged in to the global platform, where it could be accessed by thousands of global customer service representatives and saved the company about 100 million USD.
Difference Between Organization Structure and CoP
A structured department working in a hierarchical model
A unstructured department working in the CoP model to create a collaborative experience
Any company or organization is usually divided into structured groups or departments and each such department has a certain number of people in it, a defined hierarchy, departmental rules and regulations, a culture, and decision-making priorities aligned to organizational objectives. Cross-departmental organization interaction is minimal, as when needed and based on approval and conditions. Knowledge within such structured departments is captured and spread in a very structured way. People working in such departments are under some pressure but everyone has to follow departmental rules and regulations for the benefit of the organization.
An organization that has a CoP structure works a little differently. What makes such an organization different is that communities that are departments are free to collaborate, connect, and share openly to work toward a business problem. Knowledge is shared across all communities so that the benefit is reaped by all communities. Working in a community is allowed and you can openly collaborate on issues, find experts, gain insights, share content, conduct training or knowledge sharing sessions, and do plenty of other stuff. In an organization based on CoP, each member lives in a social and collaborative environment.
In this example, we saw a departmental organization turn into a CoP based organization through the discussion of customer service representatives over breakfast or lunch. Microsoft as an organization also works in a CoP manner to complete its projects. As an example, say that Microsoft wants to develop a new webpart in the SharePoint Communication sites so that its employees can book Uber rides. In this project, there are different teams or CoPs, such as the SharePoint development team, the Azure active directory team which ensures that users book rides from Active Directory, the Infrastructure team that hosts this webpart in the cloud, the Marketing team that markets and announces the feature, and the customer service managers that help customers using this webpart. So you have people from different communities or departments, with various expertise and backgrounds and different locations, but with one objective.
Benefits of Communities of Practices (CoP)
Here are some benefits of CoP.
Develop a transition and transformation approach as a key differentiator
Provide experienced, mentor managers to the sales process
Minimize the cost impact of transitions in the pricing
Share best practices from existing engagements
Develop current customers toward reference customers
Identify and develop cross/upselling opportunities
Position solution design as the enabler of high-quality services
Adapt standard solution design to specific customer needs
Solution design is the basis for competitive pricing
Use a common, proven approach for the transition for all proposals
Accelerate the transition and minimize costs
Provide reusable for processes, tools, and templates
Ensure the usage of the standard methods and tools
Extend the utilization of the production centers and their capabilities
Ensure consistent standard delivery structure for all customers
Ensure usage of standard methods and tools
Ensure quick staffing of transition roles
Make best use of existing knowledge and assets
Promote new roles as an attractive career path
Provision/exchange templates and best practices
Coach junior teammates or interns
Cooperation with expert sales team
Make use of best practice delivery approach
Ensure ability to deliver
Develop ambitious but realistic transition plans
Ensure comprehensive risk/mitigation plans
Drive the continuous improvement of our transition/transformation approach
Share lessons learned and results
Drive the continuous improvement process
Improve customer satisfaction
Make use of best practice delivery approach
Ensure ability to deliver
CoP is an initiative that deals with people and is meant for them. It is designed toward growth of an organization when growth of employees is achieved. CoP is a forum where everybody will have their say over ongoing business issues or changes taking place in the organization. Management will have some work with the CoP system, as they have to constantly motivate their community so that it does not lose interest, become unfocused, and die out. Community sponsors have also their role cut out in order to meet community requirements. In my experience, I had an opportunity to implement a CoP initiative for an organization specializing in IT services and had the strength of 3,000-odd people divided into 15 different communities.
Organizations have to envision communities as an important platform to nurture talent in their current and potential areas of competitive advantage. Therefore, you must actively promote and support the CoPs as learning platforms for employees to collaborate by sharing knowledge and imparting skills.
TechnoWeb 2.0
There were two platforms used in the CoP initiative—TechnoWeb 2.0 and SharePoint. We will discuss SharePoint in more detail, but let’s take a look at TechnoWeb first.
Exchange of information and knowledge so as to identify cross-sector competences and leverage synergies and innovation potential in an integrated technology corporation.
Facilitated voluntary and direct knowledge sharing between experts.
Dynamic structure of content and know-how.
Cross-linkage to existing contents and tools (e.g. blogs, wikis, SharePoint, etc.).
Very low entrance barrier to create own technology network (open platform).
Based on Web2.0 features as experienced in existing social networks.
No cost for users.
What is not intended: Creation of a new database for technologies.
Build a community objective
Fill and circulate a GAA community survey
Create a community on TechnoWeb and add members to it
Upload your plans and documents on the community page
Create new ideas under the Submit Your Ideas link
Send updated status tracker of activities for governance
List of network members mentioning hub and spoke (regional/cluster)
Develop a community plan covering scope, goals/objectives, defined output, and other knowledge resources and active members
Propose an investment plan with ideas
Create TechnoWeb communities
Respond to community surveys
Integrate or migrate content from existing community sites to new destinations, post validation
Provide a communication pack on what CoP is and other introductory material
75% of respondents said that the CoP initiative will help them collaborate with peers and colleagues based on different locations and countries
62% of respondents said that there must be support from community leaders for the growth of community
60% of respondents said that they do not want reply mails as it consumes too much time.
70% of respondents said that the CoP initiative will help them problem solve, gain customer satisfaction, follow standardized processes, and share knowledge.
Total membership of 3,000 members was achieved
Workshops and internal offering presentations, documentations, and solution to problems were shared across various TechnoWeb networks by different community members
Customer appreciation was shared through TechnoWeb
Community charters, plans, and required engagement lists were uploaded on the SharePoint page
SharePoint sites became a unique place for a document repository
Events were organized through TechnoWeb and training documents were hosted on the SharePoint site
CoP does look very complex when you just look at the concept, but when you implement it, it becomes simple and valuable to your career, the employees, and the organization. This implementation of CoP, I did some eight years ago, at the time of writing this book, but it is still close to my heart.
CoP Using SharePoint Communication Sites
In this section, we discover the manner in which we can implement the CoP initiative using SharePoint Communication sites. Today, it has become quite simple to drive such initiatives using modern features of Communication sites, as we have observed in previous chapters. No customized development is needed unless you have a very specific purpose. Using Communication sites, each community can be managed with ease and this can be done by creating different Communication sites over a single Hub site. Consider the following steps when executing CoP through Communication sites.
Identify the Purpose of CoP Initiative
Before doing anything, identify why you want to have a CoP initiative in your organization. Possible reasons could be to make your employees be collaborative by sharing work-related problems and solutions. You want to make your organization social by adopting a people-first direction. You want to reduce the gap between employees and management. You want to make your organization a place of knowledge sharing. You want to go digital with the CoP initiative. Conduct a YamJam session on Yammer with your employees and crowd-source the objective for your CoP.
In the previous example, we saw that knowledge sharing was the criteria to create a CoP using TechnoWeb and SharePoint. Once you set up an objective or purpose, it becomes clear to you what goals you want to achieve and what you must do to achieve these goals. There should clarity in such initiatives on a day-to-day basis. You’ll need to deal with people and imagine if your objective had some ambiguity—employees will not cooperate as they themselves would be in difficult position. So it is important that you define a clear purpose or objective for the CoP initiative with the help of the employees and management.
Identify the Communities
Once the purpose is clear, it is time to identify the communities. The organization can be divided into communities that are somewhat like departments, but with different backgrounds. You can have communities based on the standard organization structure such as Human Resources, Information Technology, Legal, Logistics, and Operations. Or, you can have communities based on the kind of work you do. For example, if you are on the Application Services Management (AMS) aspect of an IT industry, a set of communities in that area could be Change Management, Incident Management, and Problem and Procurement Management. This is subjective and entirely depends on the owner of the CoP program what types of communities are required, how they should work, and their expectations. So taking these aspects into consideration, communities can be created.
List of communities for CoP
For a community site in CoP, you play with webparts to make it visually appealing. Create a strong home page using the Hero and Story webparts. Make the site collaborative by adding the Yammer webpart. Add customized apps using PowerApps. Add a Document Library to create a repository of documents. With such an approach, any site can be redeveloped at any given point in time without affecting other sites.
Define the Community Roles
Once you define the communities you want to have in your CoP initiative, you need to define the roles that you want to have. We are not going to define a hierarchy like the one we have in a traditional organization, but by defining roles, we are going to define the responsibility of each part of the community organization. Once this is clear, people will know what they need to do and there will not be any ambiguity.
Community roles
We’ll look in detail at these roles and responsibilities in the following sections.
Community Head
The head of the community overall is responsible and accountable for the CoP initiative. Heads will have to make sure that the initiative runs smoothly and mitigates major challenges. Heads will have to ensure that the spirit of the community is always good and if there is some major deviation, action will be required. The head is also responsible for ensuring that the community’s financial targets are met, tangible business value is generated, and that they are answerable to stakeholders.
Community Sponsor
The community sponsor reports to the head. The sponsor will allocate budget to different communities to make sure the community objectives are achieved. The sponsor will also need to review progress and assess challenges and obstacles in the CoP initiative. The sponsor owns the governance part. The sponsor will need to meet with community leaders on a weekly basis to track status and report to the head of the community. The community sponsor will appoint community leaders based on their areas of expertise. The sponsor is crucial, as this is the middle level between the community head and the leaders.
Community Leader
A community leader is expected to be an expert in an area that the community objectives define. If you have community based on SharePoint, a community leader would be expected to be an expert in SharePoint so that there is a clear understanding of the community objectives and value it will generate to the organization. Also, the community leader provides guidance to the community members, identifies area of opportunities, and ensures smooth execution of the community engagement activities. The community leader role can be compared to a coach or mentor, but having related expertise. The community leaders are also expected to highlight major challenges linked to the community in front of the sponsor.
Community Members
Members are expected to perform actions that are linked to community objectives and highlight challenges to the leader. Members need to have a clear understanding that their growth is proportionally linked to organizational growth, therefore they need ensure that all actions are executed with the same passion and confidence. They also need to highlight new growth and learning opportunities. Some members may be interested in conducting a workshop, taking a training, and going onsite to work directly with clients, so these should be proposed to leaders who will assess and make decisions based on the interest of the community.
The community roles and responsibilities should be drafted and hosted in the Document Library. Further, this needs to be shared with all community members, leaders, sponsors, and heads, so that everybody takes ownership and meets the organizational objectives.
Perform Engagement Activities
Engagement topics are lists of engagement activities that a community is expected to perform in order to establish a potential community. Engagement activities include activities such as defining the community objective, creating a community plan, creating reusable knowledge resources, and proposing new ideas and new wins in each community. A community itself is an organization with a community leader as its head. The community should continue to work on their services and this should be linked to the community objective. A community objective could be creating SharePoint Online experts. To achieve this plan they might provide training and certification for community members, and proposed investment ideas could be developing a lab that will demonstrate use of SharePoint Online to customers.
Measure the Success of the CoP Initiative
We have to come to last part where we want to measure the community success and this is perhaps one of the difficult tasks as we have seen so far. Without a return on investment, any initiative is eventually a dead one. To measure success, one straightforward measure is to see returns achieved by investing in a community. For example, if a sponsor has invested 10 million USD in a community and returns are 12 million USD, we see that there is 2 million USD return. Not only this, but there are some intangible returns, such as reusable assets created by one community that benefitted other community and, as a result, the second community displayed a larger profit. Success would also depend on the new success stories created by the CoP initiative. If you want to measure success, define the parameters at the launch of the initiative and monitor them regularly.
Summary
Market research produced by Gartner said that employees get 50% to 75% of their relevant information directly from other people. Also, a McKinsey report found that lots of information and knowledge flows through informal employee networks compared to the official hierarchical and matrix structures. Both of these observations support the CoP initiative, which will help employees discover solutions, knowledge, and connections through their own ways in an organizational setup.
Organizations will have organizational and hierarchal barriers, business processes, and project specific barriers, local culture, time, and language barriers and, finally, isolated knowledge islands. SharePoint Communication sites is an ideal platform to overcome these barriers. SharePoint Communication sites will open knowledge horizons and enhance interpersonal communication beyond islands. Employees with different expertise will cross-fertilize in networks and foster innovations. The sites will access knowledge networks by providing access to tacit knowledge.
With SharePoint Communication sites, questions such as “How can I better connect with colleagues in a global company setting?” and “Who can I exchange experiences with on this promising technology trend?” can be answered.
In this chapter, we learned what the CoP initiates, how it will benefit organizations, and how we can implement it using SharePoint Communication sites. Features in Communication sites are simple to use in implementing such issues. Further, we saw a practical example of the CoP initiative and I believe you will find it useful. In the next chapter, we explore another landmark of Communication sites and we discover how it can be used to manage social knowledge.