What is the definition and organizational form of CoP (Community of Practice) 1-CoP?

This article is translated from the safety practice community.

As the saying goes, smart people learn from mistakes, smarter people learn from others' mistakes, but the smartest people learn from others' successes.

-Zen proverbs adapted by John C. Maxwell.

CoP (CoP, Community of Practice) is composed of people who participate in the collective learning process in the field of common efforts of human beings: a tribe who studies for survival, a group of artists who seek new forms of expression, a group of engineers who are committed to solving similar problems, a group of students who define their identity in school, a new network technology explored by surgeons, and a group of managers who help each other for the first time. Anyway:?

A community of practice is a group of people who share the same concern or enthusiasm for what they do. They learn how to do better through regular interaction.

SAFe community of practice is a concept in Safe (Enterprise Agile Framework). CoP is a group of people who share the same interests in a specific technology or business field. They collaborate regularly, share knowledge and information, improve their skills, and actively devote themselves to studying and researching the cutting-edge knowledge in this field.

A healthy CoP culture is based on the concepts of professional network, personal relationship, * * * sharing knowledge and * * * sharing skills. Through voluntary participation, CoP provides knowledge workers with opportunities to experience autonomy, specialization and importance outside the daily work of Agile Publishing Training (ART), which is a concept of SAFE [2].

CoP enables participants to exchange knowledge and skills with people in the same field throughout the organization. The openness of CoP can gain extensive expert knowledge, thus helping to solve technical problems, promoting continuous improvement and making more meaningful contributions to the larger goals of enterprises. In this way, enterprises can benefit from the following aspects: solving problems quickly, improving quality, cross-disciplinary cooperation and increasing the retention rate of top talents.

According to winger [1], a CoP must have three different characteristics to be regarded as a community of practice, as shown in figure1:

Figure 1. Community of practice has three obvious characteristics?

Field-* * Areas of common interest.

Practice-* * Same knowledge, experience and technology.

Community-a group that chooses to join. They pay enough attention to a topic and participate in interaction regularly.

Lean-Agile principles and practices advocate cross-functional teams and projects to promote enterprise value delivery. Similarly, lean thinking also emphasizes organizing people with different skills around the value stream. But developers need to communicate with other developers, testers need to communicate with other testers, and product leaders need to communicate with peers in other agile teams. This is very important for giving full play to various people's experience and different types of practical knowledge. This is also an important force to promote craftsmanship and continuous learning (see the article on continuous learning culture) and to promote the adoption of new methods and technologies.

CoP provides support for domain-centric interaction. CoP is an informal network, which is specially designed for efficient knowledge sharing and exploration across teams, and publishing trains (safety terms) and the whole organization. Figure 2 provides an example of role-based CoP, which is one of the most common types of communities.

Figure 2. Role-based community of practice?

For example, Scrum Master from different agile teams can form a CoP to exchange the practice and experience of building an efficient agile team. As CoP begins to be accepted and participated by more and more people, theme communities as shown in Figure 3 will begin to appear:

Figure 3. Theme-based community of practice?

These CoP members can be more diverse. A CoP with the theme of DevOps can attract the participation of almost all roles in the organization.

The CoP of automated testing can be composed of test engineers and developers who are interested in improving their testing skills. Agile architecture and design CoP can promote the adoption of practices, such as emergency design, intentional system architecture, continuous integration and reconfiguration. It can also support the construction and maintenance of the framework runway, cultivate design thinking, and design testability, deployment and application security. However, other COPs may be formed around agile guidelines, DevOps and continuous delivery pipelines, compliance, built-in quality practices and other new processes.