Use a Community of Practice to Enhance the Learning from Training Programs

It’s a great way to keep the learning going and engage individuals in their own development

Creating a Community of Practice enables you to enhance the learning that participants receive from training programs. Let’s look at an example of a client who utilized a Community of Practice (CoP) to enhance the learning from a project management program that they offered to their project management-focused staff. But first, let’s define a CoP.

A CoP is a forum that enables individuals with a common interest to share information, best practices and experiences, thereby learning from each other and continuing to develop themselves personally and professionally. It can be online or it can be individuals meeting on a regular basis face-to-face. For example, the Project Management Institute has a variety of CoPs around specific interest areas such as: consulting, learning & development, agile – to name a few.

In this client case study, we developed a SharePoint site to serve as their CoP. Let’s talk about how we got there first. We were working with the client to develop a formalized professional development and mentoring program for their project management-focused staff. This included program managers, project managers, project team members, project administrators and schedulers, and individual contributors on projects (brought in on occasion as needed). The professional development program consisted of a combination of technical skills training (such as risk management, EVMS) and management/leadership skills training (such as communication skills, team leadership). Not every person participated in every offering. For example, project schedulers and administrators did not take the EVMS course.  The program also incorporated a mentoring component where more senior individuals – such as program managers and senior level project managers – mentored more junior members. The more senior individuals were mentored by others within the organization (such as business unit VPs).

The client wanted to be sure that the participants in the program would be able to continue the learning. Certainly we had a very heavy activity-based, hands-on program – with exercises, team projects and case studies and we included action planning. However, the client wanted to be sure that the group of individuals could continue to learn and develop their skills. To that end we created a SharePoint collaboration site (many tools enable to collaboration, but the client was heavily into Microsoft and already used SharePoint for a few other things so it was a perfect choice.)

To understand what would be of value in the CoP, a survey was sent to all project management-focused roles asking them to choose from a list (along with write-it ideas) of what they would find of value in a CoP. From these surveys results, the CoP was developed with functionality desired by those who would be using it.

The SharePoint site was named: The Project Management Community of Practice and included:

• A repository for all project documentation, project templates, project tools, lessons learned from past projects, project process flows (such as for decision making, problem solving, etc.)
• A listing of all project resources and their backgrounds, expertise, special skills, etc.
• A calendar that tracked current projects and assignments on those projects.
• “How to” webinars – such as how to do EVMS, how to complete a risk management plan, etc.
• Discussion forums for best practices, team-based problem solving, getting advice, etc.
• Articles, white papers and blog posts of interest.

The CoP was introduced before the professional development program began so that individuals could begin to utilize it while in training. It was also socialized in a variety of ways to get people excited about its use:

• “Bagels & Coffee” (breakfast get-together to demo the CoP)
• “Lunch & Learn” (lunch get-together to demo the CoP)
• Emails
• Company newsletter
• Company portal
• Posters throughout the hallways and in the cafeteria

The CoP was opened up to all employees so that even those individuals who ran their own mini-projects were able to learn and get valuable information to use. In fact, one employee got great advice from her co-workers about how to plan her parent’s 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration!

At the six month mark, a survey was done of everyone using the CoP. The results were outstanding with all participants noting that they found the CoP of tremendous value in getting their work done and have even found it a great way to keep in touch with colleagues. Additionally, the managers of the participants noted that projects were being better managed and problems solved at lower levels within the organization because of the support provided through the CoP.

How have you used a Community of Practice? Please share your thoughts with others in the Comments field below.

Thanks!