Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Three characteristics are crucial:

•The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.

•The community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together.

•The practice: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest–people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

Why participate in a Community of Practice

“I was able to engage two mentors to assist in obtaining guidance and counsel. As a result I improved my relationship with the client and was able to leverage subject expertise from individuals to assess and provide recommendations on an IT / business architecture in only three weeks, saving weeks of time. And we signed a $4m contract that would have gone to a major competitor.” IBM

• Improved Client Relationships
• Time Savings
• Increased Revenue
• New Business

“I used the community’s Q&A forum to ask a question related to a project I was working on. I received 10 or so responses. Some of my questions were answered outright whereas I received leads on where to find answers to other ones. It saved me time in that I didn’t need to spend time searching the web or researching. I was able to get quick and precise leads on things I was interested in. Difficult to quantify saving but probably in the order of three to four days work.” Siemens

• Access to Knowledge
• Time Savings
• Ability to Execute

“Documents and templates from other community members saved at least 60% of my time for the project implementation process and around 40% during the planning phase. It also helped with customer satisfaction, creating confidence that the project was conducted under effective methodology, process, and procedures. Potential cost savings may be in excess of 30%.” Johnson & Johnson

• Customer Satisfaction
• Time Savings
• Cost Savings

“The materials I received saved me and my teams between three and six months of research and distillation activities. That time allowed us to kick off the pilot program on time and more effectively than we likely would have done alone. I am convinced we benefited greatly from the improved skills. Certainly my performance review for last year would not have been as successful as it was if not for the level of expertise I gained from others.” Bristol-Myers Squibb

• Customer Satisfaction
• Project Success
• Employee Performance
• Increased Skills & Know How

How do I start?

There is a set of syndicated Product Management Communities of Practice, illustrating the cross-functional multi-disciplined nature of Product Management. You can start receiving the benefits discussed above by joining a LinkedIn group representing the Community of Practice of your choice. The images below are hyper-linked to Linkedin.

“Dub” McNamara from F.L. McNamara Consulting gave a presentation entitled “Linking the PMO to the Organization’s Strategic Plan.”

He started off talking about the purpose and mission of the PMO office he currently works in, and then to a more general audience he did talk about how he perceived other peoples PMO offices to be. Here is a combination of what he said and what I thought as he was saying it.

A Project Management Office can manage projects in technology and process, sometimes they manage projects in sales, marketing, accounting etc.  So they are a group of project managers that manage projects regardless of content. They get involved more with high risk/high profile projects for hands on management. The PMO has project management skills that other departments may or may not have. A lot of times an executive team will create a PMO when “nothing is getting done.” Lots of great projects with nothing coming to completion.

So with all this insight I had to ask myself, and maybe you would to: Does the person in marketing have the project management skills to successfully complete the project that was just assigned to him, what about that critical sales project that John just took on, or the team in IT, accounting, etc? Cathy Liggett, @cathyliggett on twitter, referred to this recently as a persons performance readiness.

Another service of a PMO can be Project Portfolio Management. PPM here refereeing to selecting, evaluating, and ranking project proposals. One point someone made in the meeting was that it was hard to get the departments to get you the information that you need to make the decision, and not only can it be difficult to get, but even more difficult to get information that is comparable.  I had a good conversation about this with Mike Boudreaux, @mikeboureaux on twitter, during Product Camp Austin. His responsibilities at his company has him deal with similar issues.

“Dub” suggested that the PMO provide coaching and training to improve the performance readiness of managers and staffs to manage their own projects. I’ve seen other companies have a separate training department that might take this on. Or check out PMI’s website for info.

In a lot of processes one of the last steps is to review and learn, Stage Gate has a post launch review, and GOSPEL has Learning. Most would agree that having a review is valuable, but the consensus in the meeting was that it was pretty typical to have a hard time conducting the reviews. Besides, sometimes the reviews are planned when their is nothing that can be done about it. I think the trick would be to hold reviews when action can have impact, not when the opportunity is come and gone.

Getting into the meat of “Linking the PMO to the Organization’s Strategic Plan” “Dub” stresses the importance of asking the right questions. Here are some he suggests:

1. What are the right projects and how are they identified and selected?
2. What are the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic objectives/initiatives?

*The Anthropology of Product Management CoP would want me to make sure to identify culture, taboos, tribes, etc. Check them out on twitter #AoPM or their LinkedIn group.

3. Who determines the organization’s mission, vision, direction, and strategic objectives/initiatives?
4. What are the goals of the organization?
5. What is the process for determining the organization’s goals and objectives?
6. What are the components of a “good” strategic plan?

There was a lot of content in the meeting, and the next part was about one strategic planning process called the Balanced Score Card. I am sure that we will have lots of posts on the Balanced Score Card, cascading score cards, service balanced score cards, and just plain old score carding, so I am going to leave that for another day. I will say thought that one of the biggest differences between Balanced Score Card strategic planning and others is the more equal evaluation of projects across some form of four categories, Learning & Growth, Business Process, Customer, and Financial, not just Financial.

Because I didn’t get a chance to twitter about this meeting, I would love to pick up a conversation on this using the #PMI hashtag in twitter, and/or comments here.

I recently talked with a Product Marketing Manager whose role was among many things, to select which out of the hundreds of proposed projects (products, or roadmaps in this case) his company should sponsor. We spent the majority of time focusing on selection criteria discovery and definition, but eventually I would have lead him a little by asking who else on his team makes the final decision. I am sure that he would have said that his team works together on the selection, but ultimately it was decided by him.

When products and projects fail there are always many reasons. Often it easy to point out that a major reason for failure was that change adoption was not addressed. Change adoption within the company developing the product and change adoption within the market that product was influencing.

Would anyone argue that when your team decides to go with your opinion you usually support it? Better yet, make sure it is successful, live it, defend it, go the extra mile with it? And when the team decides to go with something that you think is wrong how easy is it for you to give that same effort and focus? Depending on how much my Product Marketing Manager wants his team and company to be on board will really determine if he wants to come to a consensus or come to a vote.

A consensus is where the team looks at all of the rationale behind each position, and comes to an agreement on what the right approach is, because each person sees how one position is being selected, and agrees that that method of selection was the best method. A vote is where the arguments are given, and then the group with the most people in agreement wins. There is one thing that a vote will always create that a consensus will not… a minority. What are your thoughts? What are some more reasons and situations for consensus vs. vote?