Improvement Service

This paper by Michael Norton at the Improvement Development Agency (IDeA) looks at the reasons why activity on a community of practice may drop off and suggests a number of activities and actions designed to re-invigorate a community.

Instructions for facilitators of CoPs on the IS/IDeA platform on how to approve or deny membership requests to their community.

Instructions for facilitators of Communities of Practice on the IS/IDeA platform on the facilitators tools menu - what it is and how to use it.

CoP facilitators tool - A series of tips and advice on how to encourage Community of Practice members to engage with and participate fully in the community.

CoP facilitators tool - suggested text for rejecting a membership application/asking for more information.

Tool for CoP facilitators - suggested text for accepting a new member into a Community of Practice.

Template for assessing your community of practice or group or network and helping you to identify areas for improvement, and who/which groups may be able to assist. How to use this tool: 1) Score your group on a scale of 1 to 5 (5=excellent) on a matrix of 5 areas (Strategic Focus, Structure and Membership, Knowledge Capture, Interaction, Benefits). 2) Identify one or two areas you wish to raise the score on (one level is easily achievable, two is okay, three or more may be considered very ambitious). 3) Using the river diagram spreadsheet, you can benchmark your scores against other groups and see how you compare across the board. 4) Still using the spreadsheet, you can see the step diagram for each area, and see who you could partner with to help them or them help you to improve. This is a useful tool to use throughout the course of the group - it is even useful at the beginning, so you can see potential goals from the outset and identify an action plan to help you to achieve level 5 in all areas.

This document helps you to formulate and envisage your community of practice (CoP). It provides a series of headings (defining the scope, governance, members, roles, and ways of working) and associated questions which will help you to give substance to your community. Remember that everyone involved in the CoP should have a say in this, not just the facilitators/administrators, so feel free to distribute it at will to anyone you think might like to become involved.

This short, informal document is a useful reference for anyone who is, wishes to be or is thinking about becoming a facilitator of a community of practice. Following these tips will help you to create a lively and useful site, where people trust each other and interesting, productive material is generated. This document is also useful for people who are not facilitators, but who would like to see how they can help to contribute to a pleasant online and offline community of practice environment.

A step-by-step guide to setting up a community of practice, which is supported by a collaboration website. The framework highlights: (1) the seven major phases to set up a collaboration site; (2) the key questions for each phase; (3) the key activities for each phase; (4) the key reference materials for each phase; (5) the key deliverables for each phase; (6) the work effort required and duration for each phase; (7) the support from the knowledge management team for each phase. The timeline to set up a collaboration site is expected to be two to four months.