Targeted for organization trying to implement Agile CoP for process improvemnt

1. Author: Bhaskar Chaudhury

2. Community of Practice - Definition
ommunity of Practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems
or a passion about a topic and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by
interacting on an on-going basis. The group will discuss and define Agile Best Practices to
be followed in projects while addressing challenges related to impediments. Communities of
practice have three important characteristics that set them apart from other communities: a domain,
community and practice. The domain defines the area of interest in which the members collaborate to
share and create knowledge. The community aspect means that members actively engage in joint
activities form relationships with each other, and share information. The practice aspect means that
they develop a shared set of resources for addressing problems in their domain of interest. Communities
of Practice can take on different roles in an organization and the roles can evolve over time. For
example, CoPs have been found to be useful when an organization changes from a functional structure
to one based on product lines or projects. In such situations, CoPs can help mitigate problems, for
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3. example by providing functional experts who used to work together, but in the new organization
structure are scattered around in different product lines, to meet and continue to deepen their
functional expertise. In this regard, Scrum has a practice called “scrum of scrums”, a synchronization
meeting where one person from each team meets to discuss dependencies.
Team A
Team B
Team C
Team D
CoP
Community of Practice
Members Formation

4. Building CoP
rimary focus of CoP in Agile Ecosystem would be on knowledge specialization and
performance improvement. The members will meet regularly for knowledge-exchange
sessions. Every member will attend the sessions with a clear objective of learning and
exchange of experiences keeping aside the regular project dependencies, issues or tasks. The
members would be primarily Scrum Masters from different teams. The members may hold
formal or informal learning sessions on improving scrum timelines, techniques to write more
effective user stories, better team management, etc. which will add value in projects and
overall framework. The community will be self-managed by those who actually practice the
role. Managers will play an important role by establishing vision and roadmap for the role
supporting the needs of the community and ensuring members have been allocated time to
participate in the community.
This requires a strategic vision to create the perfect agile strategy that manifests principles of
adaptation across the value chain. An enterprise's agility drastically reduces if only part of the
value chain is agile; hence, an Agile Enterprise needs an Agile Governance to drive Agility across
the organization.
Below are some stages to start and grow the community –
1. In the potential stage there is not yet any community, rather a set of interested people that start
networking around a topic of joint interest. Key issues that the network needs to deal with at this
stage to evolve into a real community of practice are finding enough common ground between
members to help them see the value of connecting, sharing knowledge, identify gaps and solving
problems together. At this stage, having an active and passionate community coordinator is
important.
2. In the coalescing stage, the community knows what exists in the organization with respect to its
domain and the community is officially launched and community events are arranged. At this stage,
coordinators are still crucial to the success of the CoP. The main challenge is to incubate and deliver
immediate value to the members and the organization.
3. In the maturing stage, the community has delivered immediate value, proving its worth and the
focus shifts to clarifying the focus, role and boundaries of the CoP.
4. Stewardship stage is mainly concerned with maintaining momentum and keeps the CoP going.
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5. Implementing Community of Practice
CoP cultivation principle Explanation
Design for evolution Expect the community to grow and evolve on its own
Open a dialog between inside and
outside perspectives
Help the community members understand what the community
could achieve
Invite different levels of
participation
Allow for different activity levels and motivations of participant e.g.
coordinators, core, active and peripheral members, as well as
external interest groups
Develop both public and private
community spaces
Both formal meetings, as well as one-on-one networking is needed
Focus on value Encourage members to be explicit about the value of the community;
let value emerge, don’t try to design it by force
Combine familiarity and
excitement
Have a routine program, but also include novel experiences e.g.
invited speakers
Create a rhythm for the
community
Find a suitable rhythm for the regular meetings

6. Benefits from CoP
CoP will generate both long-term and short-term benefits to organization and members.
Benefits to the organization include helping to drive strategy, starting new lines of business,
providing an arena for problem solving, transferring best practices, developing professional
skills and increasing the retention of talent.
Benefits to the members include help with challenges, being better able to contribute to one’s
team, enhanced professional reputation and a strong sense of professional identity.

7. Below are some areas of interest:
1. Sharing Impediments that are raised and resolved during the course of the sprint. It is likely that the
individual teams may not discuss resolved impediments during their Sprint Retrospective sessions. By
bringing it to the COP, other scrum masters can be aware of possible impediments and plan for
mitigating them.
2. Discussing feedback from Retrospective sessions – Sharing top three places for
improvements or things that went well from individual product teams. This would typically resemble
the ‘scrum of scrums’ or could be a pre-requisite to the ‘scrum of scrums’ meeting. By sharing
feedback from each team’s retrospective meeting, the scrum masters can identify common items
that could emerge as enterprise issues requiring prompt escalation and support
3. Identifying areas within the framework that require coaching the team members. As an example, a
technically strong resource in the team may not be familiar in differentiating between Product and
Sprint Backlogs. Scrum Masters can identify common areas and plan for coaching a larger audience.
4. Bringing distinct scenarios that their teams experienced during the course of the sprint. These
scenarios help others scrum masters in being prepared and foster an environment for considering
‘what-if’ options. Since the framework is light, the options can be documented as guidance for future
reference.
5. Identifying tools, solutions and techniques as the organization evolves. Examples include– selection
criteria for online agile tools, supporting distributed teams, discussing Agile techniques, methodology
such as XP, Kanban, etc.
6. Co-ordination & Synergy in release plans that have dependencies among product teams. A quick
update on dependencies could aid scrum masters and their teams during Sprint Planning.
7. Virtual CoPs are created who maintain domain specific backlog while each member of CoP becomes
part of Agile team. Each CoP will have a lead that functions more like domain product owner and will
be self-organizing.

8. Business Value and ROI
Following are some values that can be derived through practicing Agile:
1. The organization can respond to technology changes faster in highly dynamic and turbulent
global business environment
2. The ability to quickly reprioritize use of resources when requirements, knowledge and
technology shifts rapidly
3. The way to respond fast to sudden market changes and emerging threats
4. Use of evolutionary, incremental and iterative delivery practices
5. Maximize business value with right sized, just enough and just-in-time processes and
resources
6. Good agile practice will serve as a building block for Agile governance
Benefits of Organizational Agility is depicted below –

9. Below is the ROI Metrics showing simplicity of return on investment. ROI here is the measure of
value within Agile methods.
As per a recent survey there can be 3 ROI variations on the basis of variables Cost and Return.
ROI variation 1: Cost reduction, constant return: For the same return and just focusing on
reducing the cost, Agile boosts efficiency and has an advantage of 141% over plan driven
approach.
ROI variation 2: Constant cost, increased return: With the same cost Agile provides higher
returns with its customer focus. Agile has an advantage of 63% over plan driven approach.
ROI variation 3: Cost reduction, increased return: Taking the advantages of both the above
variations. Lower costs and higher returns lead to forward leaning projects and here Agile has
an advantage of 205% over traditional plan driven approaches.
The business value delivered through Agile practices is building quality software that will
generate business value to Customer within limited cost and timeframe. This is in contrast to
traditional practices where creating processes and documentation are considered to add
business value. Through agile practices software development team will exhibit high level
software craftsmanship and satisfy customer with early and continuous delivery of valuable
software.

10. Good Practices
Few good practices are shared below which can generate high efficiency in any Agile project.
Proper Team Room: There can be 60% boost in team productivity from this practice.
Short Iterations: Any software development projects use iterations that are two weeks long or
even a month long. I strongly recommend iterations that are only one week long. Again, the
benefits are incredible: team will move through the stages of team development (forming,
storming, norming and performing) much more quickly than with longer iterations or no
iterations… thus leading to high productivity much sooner.
Test Driven Development: Gains can be substantial when high speed of development is done
with high quality development. TDD results in doing higher quality development. Defect rates
can be reduced at least 5%