Leveraging lessons learned for distributed projects through Communities of Practice

Mauricio Cristal, Juliano Reis

Mauricio_Cristal@dell.com, Juliano_Reis@dell.com

Abstract

Stakeholders in the technology market understand that active management of past project lessons learned is the basis for promoting improvements to organization processes assets. However implementing and deploying an effective and easy manner to collect and share tacit knowledge throughout organizations is not trivial, especially for remote distributed ones. In order to make this process easier, community of practice (CoP) appears as one way to manage tacit knowledge in distributed organizations. It empowers collaborators to resolve technical issues through collaboration and participation in virtual communities. These communities would be responsible to review lessons, allow discussions regarding the subject or problem to find out the root causes and after analyze it and share tacit knowledge across collaborators. This industry report will describe an experience in the software industry that is following CoP definitions to share tacit lessons across global units. 1. Introduction

As a globalization consequence, many organizations are executing distributed projects in different countries, and generating competitive and valuable information in company branches around the globe. This fact is being brought to the attention of Executive levels due to its impact on company miscommunication and losses of productivity.

Even for local projects, coordination of the amount of knowledge generated is not an easy task. This coordination becomes even harder in global projects because of such issues as time zones differences, cultural differences across team members and eventually lack of trust [10]. Perception mistakes and wrong media selection for communication can also contribute to this scenario.

Perception mistakes can be described as the limited visibility that the work of non-collocated members has on the rest of the distributed team. This perception can impact not only communication during project execution but also the lessons learned captured. Lessons tend to capture the incorrect root causes of issues (or opportunities) leading teams to implement

incorrect improvements for organization processes assets.

Wrong media used can result in a loss of expertise. One example is e-mail usage. In certain projects team members exchange valuable information for their organization through e-mails. A lot of important information can be just forgotten in some team member’s inbox instead of being saved in a common entity to be shared across the entire organization.

In order to minimize those risks and issues in coordination of global projects, this industry report will describe a way of applying communities of practice concepts for distributed organizations. 2. Communities of Practices: concepts and advantages

Communities of practice (CoPs) are important to the functioning of any organization, but they become crucial to those that recognize knowledge as a key asset. From this perspective, an effective organization comprises a constellation of interconnected communities of practice, each dealing with specific aspects of the company's competency–from the peculiarities of a long-standing client, to manufacturing safety, to esoteric technical inventions. Knowledge is created, shared, organized, revised, and passed on within and among these communities. In a deep sense, it is by these communities that knowledge is "owned" in practice.

The CoPs are distributed groups of people who share a concern, set of problems, mandate or sense of purpose. As (often) informal groups of experts, CoPs serve to reconnect individuals with each other in self-organizing, boundary-spanning communities and, by this way we can compare CoPs with the World Wide Web environment. CoPs complement existing structures by promoting collaboration, information exchange, sharing of best practices across boundaries of time, distance, and organizational hierarchies. They capture our collective intellectual capital-knowledge, experience, research, and ideas, making it accessible to client engagement teams, no matter where or when it's needed. These things are vital to business success.

During the socialization mode, tacit knowledge is transferred through interactions between individuals, which may also be accomplished in the absence of

IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE'06)0-7695-2663-2/06 $20.00 © 2006

language. Individuals may learn and gain a sense of competence by observing behavior modeled by others.

3. Advantages in lessons learned coordination

Another important point of using CoPs for knowledge sharing is that in this mode of community there is no need to track or manage the tacit knowledge. The tacit knowledge will appear through discussions and experiences exchanged among the CoP’s members. So, it makes CoP’s able to handle and manage all information by themselves. Everybody can bring up the explicit knowledge and, after discussions with the CoP members, tacit and trustful knowledge emerges as well. Although the CoP needs some kind of organizational structure in the beginning of life, as soon as the CoP’s members begins to make comments and exchange knowledge, this organizational structure can be removed and the CoP will survive on its own. The important concept of this kind of community is: (i) don’t have rules to guide the discussions and (ii) don’t have any kind of organizational hierarchy. These two points will make the CoP free to create the best tacit knowledge and, consequently, sharing the best practices and lessons learned among all CoP’s members.

CoPs are not a new kind of organizational unit; rather, they are a different cut on the organization's structure–one that emphasizes the learning that people have done together rather than the unit they report to, the project they are working on, or the people they know. CoPs differ from other kinds of groups found in organizations in the way they define their enterprise. They exist over time, and they set their own boundaries since they are self managed. 4. CoP and lessons learned for software development distributed projects

Communities of Practice can help distributed software development organizations to manage lessons learned because they empower collaborators to bring lessons to discussion within the communities they are part of. They encourage teams to propose processes, assets and updates which increases work productivity and commitment to organizational standard processes.

CoP can be organized by role and technology. In a software development organizations there can be communities for developers, analysts and project managers. Depending on community size, they can also be organized by technology. For instance developers can specialize their community in technology A and technology B sharing practices for a specific programming language within each community.

CoP is structured in a way that each member is in fact a practitioner team member in a project. It is each team member’s responsibility to leverage any specific lesson he/she learned during the project life cycle that is applicable to the entire community. CoP evaluates each lesson input and decide upon one of several actions::

• Propose process updates to the organization standard process

• Propose to subject matter experts to store a lesson as an item in the organization knowledge repository classified by a specific taxonomy

• Disregard it deciding that the lesson is not generally applicable 5. Conclusion

This article recommends usage of communities of practices to share lessons learned for those organizations that recognize knowledge as a key asset. By following this approach, companies can empower collaborators to participate and resolve questions about practices and issues. Consequently, team members’ relationships increases which minimizes miscommunications and work losses imposed by geographic distance between remote company branches. 10. References [1] Wenger, E., R. McDermott, and W.M. Snyder. “Cultivating Communities of Practice”. 2002 [2] Saint-Onge, H. and D. Wallace. “Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage”. 2003 [3] Hildreth, P., Kimble, C. “Communities of practice in the distributed international environment”. 2000 [4] Leonard, D. Sensiper, S. “The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Group Innovation”. 1998 [5] Christopher, M. “Relentless Growth”. 1998 [6] Wheatley, M. “Discovering Order in a Chaotic World”. 2002 [7] Empson, L. “The Challenge of Managing Knowledge”. 2003 [8] Takeuchi, H., Nonaka, I. “The Knowledge-Creating Company”. 1995 [9] Viscio, A.J., Pasternack, B.A. “The Centerless Corporation”. 1998 [10] Evaristo, R. “Geographically Distributed Project Teams: A Dimensional Analysis”. HICSS, 2000.

IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE'06)0-7695-2663-2/06 $20.00 © 2006