Difference Between Organization Structure and CoP

Figure 6-2 shows the operating model of an organization based on departmental hierarchies.

Figure 6-3 in contrast shows a typical CoP structure.

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.

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.

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.

In Communication sites, you can create one Hub site for organizational related matter and all the communities can be connected to this Hub site. By having such a structure, each community will have rights to manage their site and decide on their own. Any change made will not impact the Hub site and it will work as usual. So you can make different community sites using SharePoint Communication sites. Once the list of communities is approved, the next step is to create sites for them with the standard layout across all communities. See Figure 6-4.

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.

Responsibilities will be simple and each individual will clearly know what contributions are required from their side to achieve the community objective and further their own career path. In an organization based on the CoP way of working, corporate growth depends on the growth of the people, so people need to be clear about their contribution, as it will impact the company’s growth. On the contrary, if the organization is lagging, that means the associated communities are growing up to the mark and some changes are needed. Figure 6-5 shows one example of the community structure in a CoP initiative.

We’ll look in detail at these roles and responsibilities in the following sections.

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.