Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice

By Kuruganti Srinivasa Murty
Head Knowledge Management
Hindustan Lever Limited

• What are Communities of Practice
• How do communities help a firm leverage and build knowledge?
• Differences between communities of practice, project teams
  and special interest groups
• Setting up and maintaining the communities of practice
• Building & sustaining community of practice -- an illustrative case: HLL Packing Community
• What does this case of Packaging Community demonstrate?

  What are Communities of Practice
Also some times referred to as "learning communities,"
"Networks," or "excellence teams"?

A community of practice (CoP) is a team of people who are bound by a shared practice, who address a common set of problems, centered around a knowledge domain (function / business process), who have got together to leverage their collective knowledge --

• to share experiences, solve problems and generate ideas
• to capture, create and share knowledge
• to formalise and initiate projects born out of common issues / knowledge gaps

Some illustrative examples of such groups with shared practice would be software developers, packaging professionals, media management professionals, supply chain professionals, project management professionals etc.,

Communities of practice help in creating a social infrastructure that would enable knowledge creation and transfer. The focus in a community of practice is on learning, building capability, diffusion of this learning among all members and leveraging this knowledge and capability to solve business problems and deliver performance improvement.

These communities of practice are especially relevant in multi-divisional organisational structures. While the integration of functions in the business units facilitates stronger focus on market performance, it could impede the learning between functional experts across the divisional boundaries, unless steps are taken to overcome this problem. In such disaggregated divisional organisational structures, communities of practice provide a means to regain the focus on functional excellence, by leveraging the informal processes and simultaneous participation of people in complementary structures -- business units, project teams and communities of practice.

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  How do communities help a firm leverage and build knowledge?

Communities of practice focus on the "learning agenda" for functional / business process capabilities in the firm and operationalise stewardship of distinctive competencies that provide competitive advantage. They facilitate faster identification / development and publication of proven methods best practices.

Communities of practice add value through --

• Members helping each other and building a common approach to develop share and leverage knowledge (explicit as well as tacit knowledge).
• Linking the organization across project teams, businesses, regions and countries

Communities of practice provide a "home" for the professional development of employees who find themselves isolated on project based or cross-functional teams without frequent contact with functional peers.

Communities of Practice do not just start or continue automatically. They need to be championed and nurtured.

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  Differences between communities of practice, project teams
and special interest groups

Communities of practice combine the strengths of both formal and informal structures in an organisation. They are more enduring than a project team, yet more structured than a personal network of contacts.

	Communities of practice - COP	Project teams	Special interest groups - SIG (Informal networks)
Purpose	Learning, sharing and creation knowledge	Accomplish a specific task	Communication flows
Boundary	Knowledge domain	Assigned charter	Extent of relationships
Connection	Common application of a skill	Commitment to goal	Interpersonal acquaintances
Permanence of composition	Constant membership	Constant membership for the duration of the project	Links are made based on ad-hoc impulses
Time scale	Long term, no pre-engineered end	Temporary, ends when project deliverables have been accomplished	Long term, no pre-engineered end

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  Setting up and maintaining the communities of practice

When setting up and maintaining a community of practice it is important to carefully consider the following building blocks.

Deliverables - Defining deliverables gives shape to the strategic justification for the CoP and gives a feeling of purpose and progress to the members. Successful CoPs mix a sense of long-term purpose and near-term value.

People - Clear roles and responsibilities ensure the smooth running of the community and differentiate it from e.g. an informal network. Ideally the CoP consists of the best people to develop the practice area.

Operation - To ensure speed and high quality of delivery, the CoP needs to have the right facilities and ways of working to ensure continuous sharing and development.

Leverage - Monitoring and leverage reinforces the relationship between the CoP and the rest of the world by ensuring communication to the larger network. Measurement of progress also makes the community easier to promote to the organisation.

Identify areas of interest (knowledge domains) that will contribute to the organisation's strategic initiatives. Establish priorities for knowledge acquisition and sharing.

Agree on purpose and responsibilities
This is the first step in setting up a CoP. It is crucial since it is the way to ensure that the CoP will deliver value and get the necessary support. It is important to at least consider the following questions right at the start:

• What is the purpose, what are the deliverables for the first 1 or 2 years?
• What will be the ongoing responsibilities?
• "What's in it for the Business?" How will the CoP satisfy the expectations of its Champion and the Business?
• "What's in it for me?" How will the CoP fulfill the expectations of the members?

People are the essence of the community of practice and we should have the best people to develop the area. The CoP should be large enough to deliver value, but small enough to allow for effective communication. Optimal size is considered to be about 12 to 15 people. Ensure a good spread of skills, experience and personalities.

Important considerations for selecting people

• Everybody needs to be a practitioner in the knowledge domain. The idea is that people can learn from each other, so it is the balance between the members that is most important.
• The person should be willing and able to give as well as take, based on experience.
• Has sufficient team working skills
• Is likely to stay in the current job for a long enough period to add value. If the group's composition changes too often, it is very difficult to deliver real value. The people should be available for at least one year if they are to be a core member of the CoP.

Make sure

• The CoP work becomes part of the personal targets of the participants where appropriate.
• The CoP is not be too large (meaningful, deep dialogue and discussion is unlikely if the membership is too large.) and has an equal spread of skills. Involve the practitioners who are not invited as members of the CoP, through the extended network.

There are three key roles that must be fulfilled to ensure effective working of the CoP. Allocation of these roles may change over the course of the CoP's lifetime.

Decide

• Who will fulfill what role in the CoP, what are the specific responsibilities attached to these roles?

Champion	CoP Activist / facilitator	Member
Main point of contact for the area in the decision making chain Motivates and steers the CoP Promotes the CoP to higher management Spends a few hours every month (does not have to be present in meetings all the time)	Engine of CoP Co-ordinates and facilitates ongoing communication Motivates, reminds, binds people Directs the content and achievements Spends a few hours a week Ensures appropriate facilities for the CoP	Has expertise in the area and practices this expertise in daily work Wants to improve his / her skills and expertise in this area Is willing and able to share this experience Represents larger network Spends a few hours every two weeks

• How will new people be brought into the CoP? When new people join the CoP, it is essential that they are quickly up to speed and involved. This will require some mentoring by their predecessor and the rest of the CoP.
  
• How long will people be part of a CoP? As discussed, participants should be in the CoP for a reasonable time span. But as people's jobs change, or they retire, make sure you have a "succession planning" in place.

Decide how the members will work together :

To ensure speed and high quality of delivery, the CoP needs to have the right facilities and ways of working to ensure continuous sharing and development. Issues to think about are:

• How often should they meet? Where will they meet?
• What will be the main means of communication? Try to find a good balance between face-to-face meetings and "virtual" contact through Email, Video/Phone conferences, Intranet etc.
• What tools do they need? Look for using the tools they already have available (email, Notes, telephone etc.) and the whole group has access to. There are more advanced tools for groupwork and communication. Contact IT department for advice.
• Do they need specific skills or training for this way of working? This would include training for using the tools as well as general team-working skills.
• How much time is everybody able to spend?
• How will learnings be captured and exploited beyond the CoP? A good tool is Debriefs; a structured approach to capturing lessons learned.
• How to build into the team working adequate external orientation? In CoP meetings inviting speakers from outside the community to elaborate on emerging topics can be one way to do this. In the ongoing responsibilities of the team members agree a way to look and go outside, and reporting interesting developments to the community.

Decide how to monitor progress and measure the added value

• Attach a performance indicator to each deliverable.
• Think about a "sales pitch" for the CoP, but also about regular updating the stakeholders and extended network about what is happening in the CoP. Use newsletters, e-mails, reports, videos and presentations as appropriate.

Set up teams / task forces to suggest how the community should establish people to people connection (periodicity of face to face meetings, videoconferences, virtual meeting etc.) and people to Information / knowledge connection. ( E-groups, bulletin boards, Intranets / knowledge portals etc.)

Formally launch the community -some of the key objectives of which could be --

• Provide visibility to the team and their efforts - the champion of the community would reiterate the relevance of the team in the context of the corporate priorities and encourage the team
• Conduct a knowledge workshop to map the knowledge relevant to the charter of the community and identify the gaps and develop a program to plug these gaps.
• Fine-tune the charter / deliverables. Establish responsibilities for content development, validation and maintenance.
  

Health checks of the community: Assess the health and value of a community within six months of launch.

• Internal value the community is delivering to its members, and
• External value that the community is delivering to the company
• How satisfied are the members of the community
• With the knowledge assets / content developed and shared?
• With the processes adopted by the community
• Support of the champion and the leader

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  Building & sustaining community of practice -- an illustrative case: HLL Packaging Community

Opportunities / Challenges

Packaging in our company is very important, both for providing protection to the product in transit and storage as well as its contribution to pack presentation / brand image. Total packaging cost incurred by the company is very significant, across various Businesses. Packaging professionals are divided by category structure (organisational silos).

The challenge is to deliver functional and operational excellence in this divisional organisational structure, without being constrained by the organisational silos of the formal structure. How do we make sure that the collective knowledge of the packaging professionals in the company is fully leveraged by the packaging professionals in each business, to add value to his business, through problem solving as well as innovations to reduce cost and or improve functionality?

Our response:

We formed a knowledge community, consisting of the packaging development managers and officers and packaging buyers of various HLL Businesses. Some of the key suppliers were also invited to be part of the extended team. This Packaging Community's Charter was to improve speed and quality of innovations, implement Packaging Technology lead cost effectiveness and practice packaging synergy across businesses through harmonisation, learning and knowledge sharing.

The team is very focused on learning, sharing knowledge and effective implementation of the team's charter. Knowledge is shared in a structured way -- each team member wearing two hats -- one of Business unit / category focus and another of Packaging Technology focus. The team meets once in two months for structured knowledge sharing and monitoring progress of implementation of the charter. This has enabled systematic implementation of innovation projects and preparation of Best Practice Documents. The team learns through proactive sharing of successes as well as failures.

The basic approach and methodology adopted by the team is --

Develop clarity on business expectations from the packaging team, understand of Packaging Skills Chain, improve understanding of Consumer needs through participation in consumer clinics, keep abreast of developments in Packaging Technology nationally and internationally, undertake brain storming and idea generation on a regular basis.

The team effectively networks with in HLL and Globally within Unilever (the parent company).

The team identified well-defined knowledge blocks in Packaging area and appointed sub-teams to specialise / lead in each of the knowledge blocks. The sub-teams will help the total team to keep up to date with technology and strengthen the packaging skill base in the company.

The team from time to time organises "knowledge workshops" with the core team and the extended team to generate new ideas and opportunities. It focuses on capability building through continuous skill mapping, gap analysis and need based training.

The team developed an Intranet application with collaborative working tools, to facilitate knowledge sharing on a continuous basis, in between the face to face meetings. This Intranet is also the repository of Best Practices and is used for replication of ideas / innovations across business units.

Results achieved:

The Packaging community has been consistently delivering as per their charter. It successfully initiated a number of cross business synergy projects and delivered significant saving.

Getting it going needed considerable attention to strengthening knowledge sharing behaviour through facilitation, training and leadership.

  What does this case of Packaging Community demonstrate?

Knowledge management is --

1. Increasing the capacity for effective action by connecting people to people and people to information.
2. Capability building -- "Raising the floor / raising the ceiling."
3. The transfer of internal knowledge and best practices -- "If only we know what we know"!
4. Avoiding re-inventing the wheel.

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