CHAPTER 30
Communities of Practice and Project Management

CONNIE L. DELISLE, PHD, PRIVY COUNCIL OFFICE, GOVERNMENT OF CANADA

KIM ROWE, P.ENG, ROWEBOTS RESEARCH, INC.

The private sector, universities, and government have invested a lot of effort in understanding the value of knowledge and, when applied, how it shapes society. But few organizations have consistently translated knowledge about the human and technical aspects of successful projects into successful delivery of new projects.

Navigation through a project life cycle often results in project failure, despite application of best-in-class tools and technology. Yet, the human behavior aspect of project management continues to be the poor cousin to technical solutions. A question of interest is, “What can be done to optimize the human aspects and resulting contributions to making a project successful?” We may all agree that a silver bullet is unlikely. Rather, learning by trial and error, sharing information and personal experiences has shown to better aligning our collective understanding of concepts that shape our understanding of project management. The venue for such activities is explored below.

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE: A SPACE AND PLACE FOR COLLABORATION

The continued persistence of Communities of Practice (CoPs) in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors has proved more than a passing curiosity. Perhaps a fundamental need among humans is to share experiences to feel part of the larger social network. It follows that business literature characterizes CoPs as, “social networks that individuals use to make sense of the workplace around them and develop a common understanding of the meaning of their roles in projects and to the organization.”¹

Arguably, CoPs have resided within organizations and in many different facets of society in the form of nonprofit groups and community groups for many years, in both face-to-face and virtual forms. Many people fail to recognize that they are engaged in CoP types relationships, they just freely do so, intuitively recognizing the value of the “esprit de corps” and sharing of knowledge and experiences. Participants tend to freely share a strong desire to develop, enhance, nurture expertise in areas of common interest, understanding the value in pooling efforts even if an immediate or tangible reward is not immediately evident. Community leadership in this context is critical. Individuals who take on this type of role appear to do so for personal and strategic reasons that inadvertently result in the collective membership bonding together.

Just as projects are a dynamic environment, CoPs are dynamic in the way that members make sense of the world. Organizations that use CoPs note improvements in their ability to communicate tacit knowledge² and transform it into explicit knowledge, better integrate new practices, and creatively solve problems across traditional practice “silos.” From a maturity point of view, CoPs have even made their way in to project management bodies of knowledge, such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) or the Association for Project Management (APM). PM Solutions’ Project Management Community of Practice also enables practitioners to use repeatable processes across all projects within an organization. Having standard processes in place for managing projects is a positive step forward in maximizing initial and repeated investments made in project management.

What encompasses a COP and what can it do for you? We set the context for investigating CoPs by looking at first and second generation Knowledge Management (KM) keeping in mind, four related questions:

1. What perspectives dominate knowledge management and learning? How do organizations and their people make sense of the business world?

2. How do CoPs influence project management?

3. What tools are needed to make CoPs effective and how are tools best used to build and maintain CoPs?

4. What appear to be best practices (CoP tools and CoP practices) of CoPs?

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

To really understand how organizations make sense of the world, we have to look past behaviors to the age-old metarules that underlie our attitudes. The dominant Western approach toward management of resources looks at how to adjust human values, beliefs, and attitudes to make behaviors and outcomes predictable. For example, capturing and maintaining information in policy and operating manuals is a way to control and direct the flow of information, and thus, resulting action.

In contrast, the thought system identified by Heraclitius (c.540–c.480 BCE) is based on a very different world view where “everything flows.” In this macro world-view, organizations undergo cycles and often-paradoxical processes of innovation.³ Eastern traditions have often accepted this world view in terms of managing resources.

Organizations manage knowledge mostly by trying to make it predictable, although second-generation KM tends to see things from a macro world view. These two views are both important to understanding the evolution of CoPs and how knowledge is shared between projects.

First Generation Knowledge Management—Microview

First generation KM mostly focused on technology solutions to provide answers to organizational woes. The basic premise was that valuable knowledge already exists, and all we need to do is capture it. This approach still prevails today in many organizations. These organizations try to achieve better performance, by improving how information is created, stored and disseminated in at least these areas of focus:⁴

1. Customer Focus. The project management priority triangle (time, cost, quality/scope) plus client or customer satisfaction suffice as the main predictors of successful projects. Lessons learned are often captured as a way to improve competitive advantage; if the customers were not satisfied, then customers will leave.

2. Project Focus. Individuals charged with solving project problems rely on resources at hand to deal with issues (i.e., software, new technology). Project work is treated as units of effort that can be reasonably controlled, and thus, the same is believed for behavior of the team.

3. Driving Decisions Down. By driving decisions down the organization to the lowest possible level, is thought to result in better quality decisions because the people closest to the problems are making them. Often, but not always, this is an optimal solution in a project environment, especially if top management is not supportive.

4. Trust and Sharing. Without trust, knowledge sharing and collaboration do not occur easily if at all. Guidelines and or knowledge repositories (i.e., databases) are put into place in attempts to capture knowledge and ensure its transfer.

5. Leadership. Here the focus is on the leader’s role in meeting goals by coordinating the efforts of organizations, groups, and individuals who are charged with completing specific tasks. Excessive dependence on heroic leadership may mean that not everyone understands his or her role within the project and organization. This makes reaching a common vision more difficult.

The heavy emphasis on technology in first-generation KM does not address issues such as inadequate knowledge sharing, limited trust, and lack of vision and poor motivation that persist despite more robust tools. Anticipated improvement to managing projects and resulting organizational performance cannot be realized by individuals simply being better at capturing, coding, and distributing existing knowledge. In response, many organizations began to focus heavily on creating conditions for accelerating use of new knowledge across the organization. This course of action does not often translate directly into tangible value, making the idea of KM itself a tough sell.⁵

Second-Generation Knowledge Management—Macroview

Second-generation KM is process oriented, focusing on how knowledge is produced through the act of communication within social systems. The individual learner and sum total of the group both have critical roles to play in project knowledge acquisition and development. To achieve this end, organizations tend to be aware of and seek to improve collective group performance in five ways:⁶

1. Gap Orientation. People learn whatever they need to help the organization, and in doing so fill in the gaps in their knowledge base. They consult colleagues and in the process (or its result), they are able to fill these gaps and develop new knowledge.

2. Self-organization. This occurs naturally in organizations as like-minded individuals group together for the purpose of solving problems. Groups tend to jointly evaluate and refine their understanding for everyone’s benefit. This work will result in new knowledge that can be further evaluated and used by the organization.

3. Mental Models. Information about the collective organizational effort may serve as the basis for employees developing mental models as guides to problem solving. For example, development of a “networked view” of people interacting in organizations is a mental model that might be contrasted with a standard “organizational hierarchy” view where knowledge is treated more as a linear exchange of information.

4. Dissemination and Diffusion. New knowledge and new mental models are diffused throughout the organization using a variety of methods such as face to face meetings, online portals, etc. By improving diffusion, organizations tend to increase their rates of innovation. A key missing part in first generation KM is that a large component of information is tacit and cannot be codified and transferred. Diffusion is one way that KM continues to evolve ad hoc.

5. Nonlinear Feedback System. As a consequence of people being keep informed, they often willingly provide experiential feedback. The rate and type of knowledge production varies, but it is typically created in a nonlinear fashion. Thus, it is not often possible to predict how knowledge will form and when it will evolve with any kind of accuracy.

In summary, organizations benefit from first generation KM through testing and experimenting with technology to better manage knowledge and to determine how individual contributions strengthen or weaken the knowledge base of the organization. Second-generation KM enables organizations to use the process of sharing knowledge across projects, both inside and outside an organization to find creative and effective solutions. Naturally, these solutions assume a project-based organizational culture that is amenable to a collaborative approach. If an organization is strictly “command and control,” implementation of a community approach might not be possible. In the case of hierarchical organizations, dependence may be placed more on team leaders.

Practical Uses of CoPs for Project Knowledge Management and Transfer

Many organizations still subscribe to some first-generation KM practices. Organizations adopting second-generation KM principles tend to be more apt to try using CoPs even if informally. However, individual learning still tends to be the central focus for many organizations. Group evaluation of information sharing approaches, and dissemination of information outside the immediate project are certainly less common. Organizations that do employ CoPs tend to capture and store “know how” (i.e., knowledge in the form of lessons learned). However, this is not often viewed as a source of competitive advantage. Knowledge repositories are mostly tied to the originating department or individual without resources dedicated to its maintenance.

Second-generation KM has sparked a more broad application of CoPs. Whether project specific or not, CoPs tend be situated horizontally across organizations. This enables participants outside a project to provide expertise and solve problems creatively even if individual is not directly involved in the project in question. The project manager often becomes a participant, along with being a leader. Solutions tend to be more collaborative. As CoPs mature, they tend to go through cycles of knowledge creation, evaluation, learning, and sharing of information across projects with in the same organization. For example, a problem in one project may serve as a partial solution in another project. In this way, CoPs continue to evolve KM in a way that puts the act of creating knowledge, and the people who do so—rather than technology—at the heart of project management.

COPS AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

If CoPs are deemed useful by project managers and their teams, why do they remain a tough sell to senior management in terms of support for the time necessary to participate and resources to fund web-based technology?

One reason may be the lack of shared understanding of what CoPs actually do in terms of creating value. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t speak the business leaders about what kind of value may be created and how that impacts the organizations bottom line. Factors such as the type of membership, medium (i.e., mix of face-to-face and/or Web-based discussion), and purpose of the CoP vary greatly. This makes nailing down a definition of value creation activities difficult, and perhaps not seen by participants as necessary.

As well, CoPs have not really become part of senior executive decision-making mindset. Advocates of CoPs are also not often communicating the value of CoPs to senior management in terms that paint a mental picture of their value to an organization. Turning grass-roots practices into core common business tools that package and mobilization knowledge products or processes for consumption often takes a long time. Although CoPs are not uncommon, they have not really been studied on par with other types of research. It appears that in the federal government that CoPs have not become mainstream quite yet. Researchers investigating CoPs need to show in simple terms how and what kind of value CoPs can have on successfully initiating, planning, implementing, monitoring, and closing projects.

Project Organizational Design

The PMBOK^® Guide presents several organizational types: from functional organizations at one extreme to project-based organizations at the other. In practice, it appears that many, if not most, organizations are a combination of different structures and may be characterized as “hybrids.” One of the hallmarks of hybrids is that professionals and groups within them function independently, relying on informal communication channels to exchange information and create knowledge. CoPs appear to be a natural fit into this environment. Some of these types of organizations use CoPs as a way to preserve knowledge that can be more readily shared across projects and develop faster and better solutions.

The role a CoP plays in functional organizations may be more of a background or support function to enable professionals to engage in discussions outside the narrow bounds of their own professional disciplines. As well, CoPs fit into project environments may provide a unifying force behind the scenes to allow specialists to share and develop expertise relevant to their fields while still providing individual expertise on demand. In a hybrid organization, CoPs support both functional and project organizations.

Project Life Cycle (Phases)

The typical project life cycle—initiating, implementing, and closing—has critical decision points where the project may continue, be changed, or be abandoned. There are many points within the project life cycle where CoPs may support and guide. For example, initiating activities include identifying the project team members, defining the scope and business objectives of the project, and identifying key stakeholders. CoPs can provide a source of information about who within the organization has the required skills set to work on a project, who has worked on similar projects, what scope issues they have dealt within in a particular type of project, and which stakeholders to consider.

During planning, a careful analysis needs to be done to ensure that the CoPs that could be of use (if more than one exists) are identified and information within these communities is passed on to the appropriate project team members. As well, if critical types of communities need to be created, and the project is large, there may be sufficient justification for including a community’s development effort as part of the project work. One practical internal application that is less time consuming is to create a CoP as part of learning support for project management courses. This is understood quite easily in terms of providing a venue for those new to managing projects so they may more easily turn learning into practice.

As well, monitoring and controlling the project may involve the support of CoPs. Community reevaluation of time, cost estimates, and work in progress; and evaluation of quality and community feedback on scope changes and change control is very useful in bringing the a project in on time, on budget, to meet the desired level of quality. Monitoring of stakeholder views in the CoP environment is also a very useful addition to the project and can ensure that everyone’s expectations are dealt with appropriately.

Finally, during project closeout, reassignment and intelligent preservation of knowledge products (i.e., deliverables), and sharing lessons learned may be supported by a CoP.

These are just some of the areas in which a Cops can help project managers and their teams navigate successfully through a project lifecycle. This may spark the reader to think about how communities can augment all of the nine knowledge areas in the PMBOK^® Guide.

Project Processes

In terms of the process groups (project initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing), results are linked. That is, the outputs for one process can become the inputs for others. The connections are iterative and require a complete understanding of interactions. To the novice project manager, a CoP may be an excellent testbed for proof of concept prior to moving to the next phase of a project. Members within a CoP make sense of the complexity of a project by testing, challenging, discussing, and either validating or rejecting premises so that conclusions or steps forward are strengthened by this process of “sense making.” Since the process group interactions cross phases, this process of “peer review” provides the organization with a level of comfort in assuring for less rework or misalignment of the project and the client expectations.

CoPs and PMOs

The Project Management Office (PMO) may set project standards and oversees the organization’s portfolio of projects. This allows the organization to evaluate the use of resources across all projects and resolve conflicts that affect project timelines. The PMO is also a very good place to examine how communities are linked across projects. Using CoPs as the linkage point for knowledge transfer is far more efficient for several reasons:

• In communities, the evaluation of knowledge is generally done by a broader range of people, ensuring that the ideas are more completely vetted.

• Communities generally exist outside the project framework and trust is already established. They can be used as opposed to setting up more formal structures and methods to get the required information transferred to the project.

• In communities, knowledge is transferred from expert to recipient and vice versa. This includes tacit knowledge transfer as well as explicit knowledge transfer. This can be much more efficient transfer mechanism than is normally used. Generally, documents would be transferred from project to project with minimal expert knowledge available to add value.

• Communities may share their knowledge broadly, strengthening the entire organization for future projects.

Every indication is that there are many benefits of CoPs for projects in general and that PMOs can play a significant role. However, PMOs are not necessary overarching structures to enable CoPs. Often PMOs are rules-bound, whereas CoPs are emergent and ad hoc. Trying to control the membership and activities of a CoP through standardization runs a risk to its effectiveness. However, by evaluating the various community and project linkages, the PMO can tell the organization how critical information can be shared between projects via the CoP structure.

SPECIFIC COP DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Technology is an enabler of CoPs, not its core function. Arguably, CoPs have been around for decades, in one form or another, given shared interest around topics. Thus, CoPs do exist and may start to as a result of discussions around water coolers, in lunchrooms, and so forth. Thus, the suggestion to formalize a CoP by setting up a complex technology platform or a project management office may not be desirable to its members. Overcoming their resistance is a topic beyond the scope of this chapter.

The tools that are used to build and maintain CoPs are also a large subject area in their own right. It includes a broad set of technologies including, but not limited to, those listed in Table 30-1. The reader should also realize that a community or communities could be formed using a variety of different technologies, and the tool choice will not necessarily reflect the quality of the domain, community or practice. Today the trend is towards greater integration of subsets these above tools into integrated collaboration and community environments.

A key area here is the link between the project tools that are now being fielded and the community tools that are being used. Communities may undertake projects that will involve the use of project tools, so communities are end users of project tools. In addition, projects have a need for communities to support their efforts.

• Learning management systems

• E-learning content management

• Portals

• Project, portfolio and program management tools

• Task management

• Workflow

• Version control

• Document lock up

• Calendar

• Calendar coordination

• Brainstorming

• Group decision making tools

• White boards (electronic and otherwise)

• Video-based visualization

• Application sharing

• Video/audio broadcast

• Simulation

• E-learning synchronous classrooms

• E-learning testing

• Document management

• Content management

• Data mining

• Read indicators

• Presence

• Wiki

• Blogging

• Subscription

• Turn taking management

• Chat

• Teleconference

• VoIP

• Phone

• Discussion boards

• Blog comment features

• Q&A

• Profiles

• Rating

• Social networking

• Social networking analysis

• Member directory

• Recognition

• Access and security

• Subgroups

• SMS polling

• Voting/polling

• Participation statistics

• Behavioral parameters

• Reflection (360° feedback)

• Photo/image sharing

• File sharing

• Taxonomy

• Collaborative filtering

• Search

• Landing page

• Email

• RSS

• Email lists

• Visit management

• Instant messaging (IM)

TABLE 30-1. KEY COP DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT TOOLS

The ability of a project to use a shared repository and have the repository directly linked to the project plan to monitor progress is an example of the an efficient means of controlling a project using both project tools and community tools. From these strong links, greater integration in the monitoring and control area of projects may be realized. In the future, integration with workflow tools and communities will see a broad set of other new features to automate rework, estimation, and scope control.

Best Practices

Best practices refer to the processes, practices, and systems that perform exceptionally well, and are widely recognized as improving an organization’s performance and efficiency in specific areas.⁷ In the context of CoPs, best practices are actually “best processes”—those that have been proven to work within many organizations for various projects. The key distinction is that practices tend to be recorded and in doing so, become obsolete quite quickly. Processes are more amenable to change and are understood to evolve as organizations become better at managing projects.⁸ The topic of best practices is extensive, reaching beyond the scope of this chapter, but a few key best practices in relation to CoPs are presented.

Seed CoPs

The use of existing CoPs is the most obvious best practice. That is, determine who (or which groups) within the organization is acting as an informal source of information and knowledge exchange. The cost in terms of time and effort to establish a new community is substantial and reuse of appropriate communities that exist within and outside an organization should be considered first. Community reuse requires a clear confidentiality understanding—essential with communities that span multiple organizations or even multiple groups.

Smooth Transition to CoPs

To allow those unfamiliar with community participation to make the transition to a community-based project environment more easily, create psychological safety through use of the following best-practice mechanisms:⁹

1. State and reiterate a compelling positive vision for being a member of a community and an active participant.

2. Offer formal training for the use of tools, and participation in the community should be included. Ensure that trust building is a key component of the CoP development.

3. Involve the learner in hands-on components during training so they may put concepts of knowledge sharing into practice.

4. Train informal groups or teams together in CoP functioning.

5. A practice field, coaches, and feedback are essential parts of helping the community and individuals to achieve effectiveness quickly.

6. Use positive role models to support and message positive information about the CoP.

7. Make support groups available for both management and technical aspects of a CoP.

8. Put consistent systems and structures in place to ensure that the user is not hunting for information on how to join and participate in the CoP to get rewarded for participation.

Free Flow of Membership

Project managers and CoP leaders may consider not limiting membership or want to assign people to take on roles because it may stall or derail a CoP. The core of a CoP is difficult to “pin down” because the very culture promotes the movement of people and ideas. Unlike a list-server, web community, or online community, CoP life cycles are open-ended and needs based. If a particular issue or problem is solved, a CoP may cease to exist, or be reshaped into a new community with some returning and some new members. Participation (under or over) is also not a reliable indicator or usefulness because experience shows that people often “lurk” but still find value.

Although projects have a need to solve specific problems, CoPs are best when self-governing. The means of self-governance should be agreed upon by the community members. For example, this was a clear need at Clarica, where individuals needed specific problems solved for their individual projects, and needed to feel that the environment was safe and supporting.¹⁰ Above all, a community leader is often the single biggest factor in ensuring this community success. For example, the West Coast CoP, a federal government service delivery community, found this to be true as has Claricia. Clarica Insurance developed an external agent CoP to provide support for individual agents as they developed various projects in the field. These agents were independent of Clarica and yet needed support from the parent company during implementation of various complex proposals. The trust of others in the community and the trust placed in Clarica was an essential ingredient of success. Without this trust, agents would have been unwilling to use the community. The community became a significant strategic asset of Clarica and the lifeblood of many agents.

Directory of CoPs

Projects can be managed more effectively when everyone knows where to find information if they need it. This makes the inclusion of CoPs an integral part of an organization’s Communication Plan under the area of Organizational Process Assets, for example. CoPs facilitate the transfer of knowledge to project members, saving valuable time, although with some risk of compromise from external members. Providing a directory of CoPs and their memberships may help organizations identify their star players who can take on various different tasks. This is basically a means to direct people to the right places to solve problems and discuss issues. The directory may be broken down by task and by domain so that users can quickly find the relevant community.

Tacit vs. Explicit Knowledge

Knowledge may be roughly divided into that which is known, knowable (just missing some pieces), complex (could be known), and chaotic (not yet knowable). Accessing the domains of “complexity” and “chaos” is perhaps the most undervalued aspect of a CoP but very useful for project-related communities. CoPs contain tacit knowledge, which is in the heads of experienced professionals, and explicit knowledge, which is coded or written down in formal ways. Dialoguing among a community members taps into complexity and chaos knowledge domains by creating new possibilities, including challenging common beliefs, norms, and drawing together multiple ways to approach a risky situation. These decision model creates probes that have the potential to result in identification of links between existing knowledge patterns and even new patterns of knowledge. This knowledge is often movable across to the ordered domains where it can lead to reshaping of current practices and approaches.¹¹

The most unordered knowledge domain, that of chaos, seems to be connected closely to the practice of managing in crises mode. The decision model is to act quickly, reduce turbulence, and sense the immediate reaction. CoPs are well versed as a collective membership to create new ways to address chaotic events in a time frame that is not possible in the ordered domains. For example, response to a fictional safety threat turned real may not be contained in any manual. This is an ideal backstop for most projects.

As project managers and organizations embrace CoPs, improvements in all areas of project management are expected.

REFERENCES

¹ In this paper, we define communities of practice in the same terms as in the work of Dawson, “Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships.” Butterworth Heinemann, 2000.

² Explicit knowledge is what we can express to others, while tacit knowledge comprises the rest of our knowledge—that which we cannot communicate in words or symbols. For more on tacit knowledge, see Dawson, ibid.

³ Vasilou, I. “Paramenides and Zeno of Elea.” A Companion to the Philosophers (R. L. Arrington, Ed). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 1999, pp. 299–301.

⁴ McElory, Mark. The New Knowledge Management. Complexity, Learning and Sustainable Innovation. Knowledge Management Consortium International Press: USA, 2003.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ The literature confuses the role of benchmarking and best practices because the terms are often used interchangeably. The relationship between benchmarking and reviewing best practices is most clearly made by Margaret Matters in The Nuts and Bolts of Benchmarking, Alpha Publications Pty Ltd., 1995. She states that organizations use internal best practice reviews to make some immediate business improvements in selected areas, and this base-level knowledge may be later used in other parts of an organization. Finally, this knowledge may later serve (depending on the organizational context) as a baseline for future measurement that involves benchmarking with external partners.

⁸ General Accounting Office. “Best Practices Methodology: A New Approach for Improving Government Operations”; http://www.dtic.dla.mil/c3i/bprcd/3209.html, 1995. See also Pinto, Jeffery, and Dennis Slevin. Balancing Strategy and Tactics in Project Implementation. Sloan Management Review, 33, 1987, Fall and into, Jeffery K., and Dennis P. Slevin. Critical Factors in Successful Project Implementation. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. EM-34 (1). pp. 22–27, 1987, Feb.

⁹ Schein. The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

¹⁰ Sainte-Onge, Wallace. Leveraging Communities of Practice. Butterworth Heinemann, 2003 and Wenger, Etienne. Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

¹¹ Snowden, Kurtz, C. F., and D. J. Snowden. “The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World.” IBM Systems Journal, 42 (3), 2003.