|
As project managers, we all collect lessons learned. Implementing a successful community of practice is similar to implementing a small project with a charter, change management processes, communication strategies and deliverables. The following lessons learned are just a few helpful hints on successfully implementing a PM community of practice.
Lesson Learned 1: Start Small but Brainstorm Big Recognizing the potential value a project management community of practice can provide is exciting. However, before the COP seeks to host a project management summit across the organization, they need to start small and continue to brainstorm big. A project management community of practice needs to provide tangible and applicable value to its membership in order to succeed and continue its growth. If the COP is just another set of bland presentations, its value can be quickly diminished.
Successful project management communities of practice start out small and grow through incremental steps and incremental successes. Emerging COPs will struggle with membership, leadership, goals and objectives, and will go through the same stages of team development phases including forming, storming, norming and eventually performing. By starting out small with practical lessons learned sessions or hosting a guest speaker, the project management COP can recognize its successes while continuing to brainstorm and plan for larger events.
I’ve participated in planning both large and small project management COP events. The larger COP events like a PM Seminar Day succeed because the COP team had previous successes implementing smaller endeavors and were able to grow and learn from each other. COPs should still brainstorm larger functions and plan to tackle larger events when the team is ready. Implementing COP events is similar to project teams learning rapid prototyping or iterative software development. Organizations are likely to apply new management techniques to small projects first and evaluate the results before applying the approach to enterprise projects.
Lesson Learned 2: Remember the Boy Scout Motto--Be Prepared What do you do if the speaker for an upcoming COP event suddenly cancels on the day of the event? You could cancel the event and risk disappointing first-time visitors to the community of practice. You could reschedule the event that took six weeks to coordinate across schedules, meeting rooms and the guest speaker’s availability--or you could pull out the backup presentation that you had ready in case this event occurred.
I’ve planned several events that required guest speakers who suddenly couldn’t attend due to travel issues, conflicting appointments or illness. Just like projects, COP events have scheduling risk and event facilitator needs to have a backup topic or alternative activity to mitigate the risk. In earlier articles, I referenced my Lessons Learned in MS-Project presentation as a quick and easy, ready-to-present activity. If I’ve already presented on the topic and need a backup, I’ve used an “Online Resources for Project Management” presentation. As your planning committee identifies topics and activities, it’ll be easy to identify backup materials.
Lesson Learned 3: Rotate COP Event Planning We all have projects to deliver, risks to mitigate and issues to resolve. Taking on additional work within a COP isn’t the easiest to handle when deadlines are due and a project is running behind schedule. It helps to have members of the planning committee rotate event planning for each of the COP meetings. The planning committee should have representation from various business units across the organizations so project management issues can be raised and represented across the enterprise. The individual committee members do not have to present at the event, although they should take an active role in planning and facilitating an upcoming event.
The benefit of a COP is the free flowing exchange of different ideas and approaches to solving project management issues. COPs need to be cognizant that one or two members are not always planning or leading the various activities. Allowing a minority to control and direct the COP can limit additional ideas and lead to burnout. Remember, participation in a COP is voluntary and requires group participation to be successful. Rotate the event planning and your COP will grow with the influx of different ideas. The membership will also appreciate the variety.
Lesson Learned 4: Establish a collaborative presence on the corporate Intranet As the project management COP grows, you’ll receive frequent requests for presentations, activity calendar, agendas and meeting minutes. A simple solution is to post the files on a shared fileserver or find some shared space on an internal Web server. The challenge with these simple solutions is they lack collaboration and group discussion tools.
If your company has implemented Microsoft Sharepoint, EMC’s eRoom or similar Web-based document sharing and collaboration technologies, consider applying it to the COP. If you have an internal website for the corporate project management methodology, a link can be easily added to your COP collaboration site. Specific sections of the collaboration forum can be restricted for the planning committee, but sections of the site should be free to the PM community to host discussions, post ideas, answer questions and share reusable project tools and artifacts.
I’ve used Sharepoint for past COP implementations and included a discussion forum, a shared project artifacts document library, voting surveys, external links and a simple roster of PM COP participants. If your company has integrated Microsoft’s Communicator Instant Messaging solution into Sharepoint, you can also see who’s actively online and available for a discussion. If your organization isn’t a Microsoft shop, you can consider a variety of open-source wikis, bulletin boards and listserv tools to support communication and collaboration.
A community of practice doesn’t need to be restricted within a single corporate entity. gantthead serves as an excellent example of an online community of practice supported by networking tools like ganttFace and niche discussion groups like the website’s GIG feature. The key to an effective community of practice is collaboration. Collaboration can occur at the same time or occur asynchronously. By providing better tools to support collaboration, your COP can grow virtually without having every team member appear in person.
Another use for the COP website is to store your own webcasts of past COP events. Affordable video cameras and free video editing tools such as Microsoft Movie Maker enable PMs to quickly capture key COP presentations and make it available to other COP participants on demand. A collaborative COP website will serve as a central pillar in your COP knowledge sharing solution.
I hope you’ve found these lessons learned are helpful. I’ve established an Establishing a PM Community of Practice GIG on gantthead to collect other ideas on improving COPs. I look forward to seeing you in the discussions!
This article was written by Andy Makar and originally appeared on Gantthead.com
|
