Another tip I find myself giving often is to combine familiarity with excitement. There’s value in holding regular events (e.g., a virtual community with it’s monthly phone call and a guest speaker). But the community is kept vibrant by occasionally mixing it up and doing something completely new.

Thanks for joining the discussion here.

Especially the “virtual” communities that social media has brought to us. Like Yahoo Groups, LinkedIN, PMI’s new “virutal Communities”. Even if you don’t have a group in your company…You can join with people from all over the world that are passionate about excelling. You can ASK QUESTIONS, other can share/mentor you with their experience.

Do you have any tips for us about “virtual” community success?

Thanks

Donna Reed
PMI Agile Community of Practice Rep, California

A good way to do this is to have multiple ways of communicating–there can be weekly meetings for those with the time and passion to be involved at that level; there can be things like twice a year events where others can involve; there can be discussion boards for daily involvement, and so on.

we started the community of practice idea within our firm a couple of years ago, and it has been very well received by our employees.

We organized them along requirements, quality, architecture and development/SDLC.

Our leadership actually initiated the creation of the COPs, but members were allowed to organize,determine objectives, and otherwise self organize.

our leadership is subsequently trying to turn it into more of an operational/management structure,but as the head of the development COP I’m trying to resist.

I would rather a community of practice act as a vehicle for passionate people to work together on work-related issues that are important to them. I also think members should be free to join or quit a community of practice according to interest.

thanks for this post – great work! I would be really glad being a team member of an agile focused company, unfortunately I am following your blog only from theory.

Charly

BTW, After you mentioned it, I searched and found an interview with Lynda Rising on fearless change
For the benefit of your other readers- http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Linda-Rising-Fearless-Change

A community approach like this can and should also happen in a Agile shop where you don’t necessarily have multiple teams working on the same project. In many shops the way QA handles the User Story is very different from one team to the next, the way the developers handle code are different, the way the Scrum Master and Product Owner runs their area is different.

One way this is probably more commonly handled is through the reporting structure. QA’s all report to one person, Developers all report to one person, Scrum Masters report to…..you get the picture. The downside to this approach is that while it ensures the “manager” is aware of the differences it doesn’t openly allow for communication laterally between team members. You might be a Scrum Master for one team doing things a certain way but could either help mentor or receive ideas from the SM on a different team.

A Community approach can strengthen individual team members in their roles AND strengthen each team working on a common projects.

In our shop, regular meetings with other Product Owner’s has been one way to handle this. It has been successful and met its purpose and intent. I do see value though in creating a more community approach which continually helps support and grow the PO’s in their roles.

Nice post Mike!