Greater need for effective communities of practice in Agile organizations

More and more companies and organizations driven by their issues are turning to agility. They set up major transformation programs that impact their management structure.Theses impacts influences the different management and decision-making processes and, they are changing the way to approach innovation to stay competitive.

These programs bring great change to the organization. Especially when the notions of self-organization and multidisciplinary team materialize and redesign the project landscape. Moreover, these organizations are abandoning the notion of a classic project and turning to agile product-oriented frameworks. These framework  like Scrum refocus the work to be done and in revelant way for customers.

New roles and functions are appearing in these organizations. The teams are then multidisciplinary and self-organizing. All members of the team have all the knowledge, know-how and skills to succeed in their mission. The work is no longer passed from one production unit to another but is carried out globally within the team. The decision circuit and the information exchanges are reduced. Waiting times between production units no longer exist. Therefore, reduces the time of realization much shorter. This visible gain then allows the organization to change course more quickly and more efficiently!

Prior to these organizational changes, knowledge and know-how were shared and managed by a team of experts from the same field. This team built and enriched a foundation of practices, knowledge and know-how specific to the company over time. Each member of the team could then deepen their expertise and find help. But what about these self-organizing and multidisciplinary teams? This base is no longer maintained. Each team creates its own repository of practices, knowledge and know-how based on the experience gained from these members.

The lack of capitalization, pooling and transmission of its practices in all the teams induces a weaker innovation, a weaker employability and a dispersing know-how. To remedy this, companies then resort to external training, send their employees to conferences or let them train on their own. Yet a simple and extremely cost-effective solution has been around for a long time!

It is the establishment of communities of practice that can also be called Chapter or Guild. This is not new. Communities of practice have been around for a long time, but they focus on sharing knowledge, less often on the exchange of practice or the development of it. The sharing of know-how was done by tutoring or mentoring.

However these eras are gone and the digital to change the deal. Knowledge is accessible to all! Just do a search on the internet and you will find the answer to your question with more or less ease. Although this knowledge is available, we do not create innovation in the same way. And we do not solve complex problems by typing a few keywords. This requires collective intelligence that can be emulated by communities of practice.

Agile Communities of Practice focus their actions from 1 to 4 aspects of the agility described in the Agile Manifesto, and rely on its principles. A balance between relational and process is established to use processes and tools as a means of developing interactions and individuals (one of these 4 values). By empowering members of these communities of practice, this will help:

• To stimulate innovation by detecting new ideas from various experiences;
• To facilitate learning by brewing people of different horizons and deepen areas of expertise ...;
• To facilitate the resolution of cross-cutting issues
• To keep track of practices and actions carried out through the organization;
• To adapt the company to the practices and the behaviors necessary to the agility of this one;
• To promote agility, practices and solutions.

Finally, these Agile communities of practice are strong supporters of organizational transformation. Through the power of the networks that the communities create, and its transversal problem-solving approach, it will bring innovative solutions adapted to the evolution of the corporate culture. It participates, through its promotion, to the evolution and expression of leadership. Thanks to this, new natural leaders are revealed. And, it is the turn of managers to become a support for these leaders and to provide the capabilities for these communities to develop and sustain themselves.