Community of practice processes

To function well and deliver good services to their members, communities of practice need the right processes, well run.

What sort of processes am I talking about? Well if you think about anything that the community or community members do or have happen to them; or other activities they’re involved in, then you have a clue. For instance:

Member and people-oriented processes:

• New member sign-up, induction and on-boarding: How do potential members find out about the community and what happens when they want to join? For instance: new member information, buddy, introduction to the community, find where they fit/what they want/what they offer; invitations and accesses to resources, services and events.
• And to illustrate the point that community processes tie into organisation-level processes, there could be a tie-in to the organisation’s recruitment and new joiners processes. For example, at which point are new joiners told about the communities and how to join them?
• Member/employee leaving process. For example making sure responsibilities in the community are handed on.
• Member engagement, feedback and participation processes.

Governance processes

• Does the community need a process for determining who will take the lead roles?
• Processes for decision making, task prioritisation and management

Content processes

• Knowledge content artefacts
• Information content management
• Content production

Service, solution and infrastructure management processes

• For whatever services and solutions the community offers, and for the supporting infrastructure, there may need to be processes

Meetings and events calendar

• Maintaining a calendar or different events
• Who organises them and what process do they follow?
• Knowledge sharing events
• Should there be processes for recognition and celebration?

Once you start thinking about what the community does, what members do or what they expect, what the community produces and how it interacts with the rest of the organisation, it will be easy to work out what processes are needed.

And this is KM itself – developing repeatable capability (process) to do things well and so optimise the experience and the outcome.

You don’t need to be heavy-handed, but clearly articulating who, or which role, does what, and how (so as to pass this knowledge on) will help the community have more time for its core focus – the knowledge it wants to develop, share and practice – with less overhead from organising it all.