Communities of Practice and Organizational Support

Establish communities of practice

Organizations we’ve worked with have found that establishing communities of practice to support the Agile roles accelerates effective performance of the roles. Composed of people who share an interest in what they do and want to get better at it, each community defines the kind of interaction that works best for its members. For example, meetings can be in-person in real-time, or they can be online.

The focus of community-of-practice discussions can be any or all of the following:

• Share knowledge generally; coach junior members

• Discuss common problem scenarios and solutions

• Share experiences with tools

• Share lessons learned from retrospectives (and invite feedback)

• Identify areas of weak performance in the organization

• Network

• Identify best practices within the organization

• Share frustrations, vent, and support one another

You can set up communities of practice for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Architects, QA staff, SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs), Agile Coaches, DevOps staff, and other specialties. Participation is usually voluntary and self-selected so that only people who are interested participate.

The role of the organization in supporting more effective Agile

Some attributes that support successful teams are under the teams’ control; many are controlled at the organizational level.

Agile teams cannot be successful if their organizations undermine their efforts. Organizations do this by blaming teams for mistakes, not supporting the teams’ Autonomy, not adequately communicating the teams’ Purpose, and not allowing for growth of the teams over time. Of course, this is not unique to Agile teams; it’s true of teams in general.

Teams can be most successful if their organizations support them by establishing a blame-free culture organization-wide, staffing the teams with the full skill set needed, loading the teams with appropriate workloads, regularly communicating the teams’ purposes, and supporting the teams’ growth over time.

Depending on where you are in your Agile journey, other leaders in your organization might need to take this journey with you. If you refer back to the Agile boundary you drew in the “What’s Really Different About Agile?” chapter, you can identify those other leaders and make plans for how to work with them.