Handbook of Community Management

A Guide to Leading Communities of Practice

Stan Garfield

• Publisher: De Gruyter Saur
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783110673555
• eBook ISBN: 9783110673821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is an in-depth tutorial on how to make communities work to really improve business performance. It covers principles and proven practices that ensure community success and longevity, provides tips and techniques for leading communities and communities programs that the reader can apply immediately, looks at different types of communities and the technologies that support them, and illustrates communities in practice.

Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services

Communities program managers need to be able to passionately describe the end-state vision for their communities program and its role in knowledge services. Community managers need to do the same for their communities. What does the program look like when it is working well? How does a successful community operate? Establish a vision for how communities should work, and relentlessly pursue making that vision a reality. An important part of articulating your vision is being able to explain the benefits of communities and knowledge services.

You can use these visions and benefits as is, adapt them to your environment, or create entirely new ones that fit your circumstances. Whichever way you do it, be ready to deliver a concise pitch on a moment’s notice that powerfully conveys the reasons for implementing and sustaining a communities program as part of knowledge services.

A vision for communities

Posting in communities is the preferred way to share information, ask and answer questions, and seek assistance.

A single global platform is available, including a master community directory, standard sites for all communities, and a standard set of tools for discussions, communications, events, and other forms of collaboration. There is one (and only one) community directory for all people in the organization, and it lists all available communities. There is a user-friendly process for requesting and creating new communities.

There is one (and only one) community for every subject of importance to the organization, its businesses, and its people, and each one of these communities has 100 or more members. This means that a single, global, cross-functional community is available for each major specialty, role, and focus area.

Everyone belongs to at least one community, including the one most relevant to their work, and possibly other communities. All community members pay attention to the discussions and activities by setting email or other notifications for the community, checking regularly online, or through other effective methods.

Whenever a community member sees a question or a request for a resource to which they can respond with assistance, they do so. All community managers actively monitor their communities to ensure that questions are answered, new threads and replies are regularly added, and that posted content is appropriate.

Anyone needing help, an answer to question, content, an expert, or information on what the firm has done and can do can post in a community threaded discussion and receive a helpful reply within 24 hours, ensured by active monitoring of threaded discussions and follow-up by community managers.

When other channels such as email are used to share, ask, or find, those who receive these messages redirect them to the most relevant communities.

Each community offers a site, a calendar, frequent events, useful news and content, and active discussions. Everyone can interact with communities in the ways they prefer, including entirely by email, mobile client, desktop client, or web browser.

When someone takes the time to share useful information, they receive positive responses in the form of likes, replies, and praise.

People post in open, public communities whenever possible, and only use private Enterprise Social Network (ESN) groups or email distribution lists for truly private interactions.

Leaders routinely post, reply, like, and praise in the community, and don’t just use it for formal communications or events.

A vision for knowledge services

The vision for communities detailed above is realized.

Everyone in the enterprise works out loud. They create spaces for observable work and narrate their work by posting in communities.

People, process, and technology elements are in place to enable everyone to conveniently share, innovate, reuse, collaborate, and learn.

A single global platform is available, with access to community sites, websites, team sites, content repositories, and collaboration tools.

Everyone can interact with the platform in the ways they prefer, including entirely by email, mobile client, desktop client, or web browser.

Everyone can easily find, follow, be made aware of, and share what is going on in the Enterprise Social Network (ESN), activity stream, blogosphere, enterprise wiki, content repositories, threaded discussion, and other similar technologies.

People are recognized, rewarded, and promoted if they share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest, and leaders set a good example by doing so themselves.

What one part of the firm knows, the rest of the firm knows. Different parts of the firm routinely work together. Ideas are solicited and implemented. High levels of trust and transparency exist. Leadership engages with all levels of the firm’s members. People work out loud and interact with people they didn’t know before. Individuals learn effectively.

Decisions are made quickly and effectively. It’s easy to find information and resources. Open communications are made frequently and widely. Redundant effort is avoided, and mistakes are not repeated. Scarce expertise is made widely available. Clients see how knowledge is used for their benefit, and sales and delivery are accelerated. Innovation and growth are stimulated. Morale is high, the firm’s reputation is strong, and the firm thrives.

Benefits of communities

Communities provide benefits to their members and to the organization. They enable members to learn from other members; share new ideas, lessons learned, proven practices, insights, and practical suggestions; reuse solutions through asking and answering questions, applying shared insights, and retrieving posted material; collaborate through conversations and interactions; and innovate through brainstorming, building on each other’s ideas, and keeping informed on emerging developments.

The organization benefits by having a reliable place where people with questions and problems can be directed to get answers and solutions, a searchable archive of the discussions, and a way for people to learn about their specialty and to develop in it. The broader the membership in a community, the greater the benefit to the organization. This is due to having the widest possible range of perspectives, the greatest possible number of people to answer questions and solve problems, and greater leverage of all knowledge shared.

Providing a way for questions to be asked and answers to be supplied is a key function of communities. Members post questions such as “has anyone done this before?”, “does anyone know how to do this?”, and “where can I find this?”, and other members respond with answers, suggestions, and pointers to more information.

Another use of communities is sharing insights, techniques, and innovations with community members. Posting a tip on how a problem was solved, a customer was helped, or a breakthrough was achieved allows many others to reuse that knowledge in other contexts. Additional benefits result from the lively exchange of ideas, regular community events, and content contributions from members.

Communities expand the capabilities and improve the performance of their members. They can be used to analyze the knowledge-related sources of uneven performance across units performing similar tasks and work to bring everyone up to the highest standard.

Communities can diagnose and address current and recurring business problems whose root causes span different organizations. They transcend organizational boundaries to knit the whole system together around core knowledge requirements.

Communities link and coordinate unconnected activities and initiatives addressing a similar knowledge domain. They connect local pockets of expertise and isolated professionals. Cultivating communities in strategic areas is a practical way to manage knowledge as an asset, just as systematically as companies manage other critical assets.

Communities are for cross-organizational interaction. They enable their members to share beyond their immediate teams and personal networks to reach everyone who might benefit from what they share.

Communities can stimulate innovation, building on one another’s work to implement improvements. They encourage reuse, taking advantage of what has already been learned and accomplished.

Collaboration is at the core of what communities do, helping members work together across boundaries for the common good. Communities are a good way to crowdsource, getting help and resources from people you don’t know. They enable learning together, allowing members to gain information they were not seeking but is valuable to know.

Communities are the most effective and efficient way to share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest. Compared to using email to get answers and resources, communities are faster for receiving responses, yield more answers that are more varied and diverse, and have a much greater probability of success. Unlike email or other one-to-one or one-to-few messaging alternatives, you don’t have to know whom to ask for help. In fact, it’s likely that answers will come from people you don’t know and wouldn’t think to ask, but who are the optimal sources of expertise.

Communities readily make possible Working Out Loud (WOL), a growing movement that encourages employees to narrate their work and broadcast what they’re doing so others can interact, respond, learn, and apply that knowledge to their own work. WOL combines observable work (creating spaces where others can engage with your content) with narrating your work (posting in social software). Leading by example and persuading others helps create an open culture of truth, transparency, and trust, provides feedback loops, and spans organizational boundaries.

Benefits of working out loud

WOL in communities can trigger serendipitous connections through transparency. Here are reasons for Working Out Loud rather than privately, through email messages, or in closed groups:

Multiple people may need to know what is going on, to read updates, and to reply. You don’t know who all of them are. With WOL, you can receive replies from all relevant people and see all people who replied, unlike forwarded email.

Working Out Loud provides transparency in thinking, decisions, and processes. You can receive inputs and feedback from anyone willing to contribute. It allows you to vet ideas in public by allowing others to weigh in, which helps achieve consensus. By leading by example, you encourage others to also work out loud as well.

WOL enables and exploits serendipity. You can meet up with people wherever you are, who otherwise won’t know you are going to be there. This allows you to exchange and support ideas with other people attending the same events and allows those unable to attend to also benefit. Participating in recurring online chats leads to gaining new colleagues.

Others can benefit from seeing discussions. You can receive advice from unexpected sources and pointers to useful information based on the relevant experience of others. It also helps everyone to learn and develop.

The act of WOL results in keeping a record of discussions. A single thread with all replies can be maintained in one place, open to all who have an interest. Everyone can easily refer back to the discussion through a public link.

Those who work out loud can build their personal brands. They can maintain a journal of their thinking for a permanent record, reuse their thoughts for blog posts and book chapters, and enhance their reputation as thought leaders.

Applying the principles of WOL avoids fragmentation of discussions into different email threads and different sets of people. There is no need to forward messages. It prevents having different people on different threads and out-of-sync replies.

If you adopt WOL, you move from old ways of working to new and better ones. You model the open way of working, demonstrate trust, and help flatten out the hierarchy.

Benefits of knowledge services

Enable better and faster decision-making. By delivering relevant information at the time of need through structure, search, subscription, syndication, and support, a knowledge services environment can provide the basis for making good decisions. Collaboration brings the power of large numbers, diverse opinions, and varied experience to bear when decisions need to be made. The reuse of knowledge in repositories allows decisions to be based on actual experience, large sample sizes, and practical lessons learned.

Make it easy to find relevant information and resources. When faced with a need to respond to a customer, solve a problem, analyze trends, assess markets, benchmark against peers, understand competition, create new offerings, plan strategy, and to think critically, you typically look for information and resources to support these activities. If it is easy and fast to find what you need when you need it, you can perform all of these tasks efficiently.

Reuse ideas, documents, and expertise. Once you have developed an effective process, you want to ensure that others use the process each time a similar requirement arises. If someone has written a document or created a presentation that addresses a recurring need, it should be used in all future similar situations. When members of your organization have figured out how to solve a common problem, know how to deliver a recurring service, or have invented a new product, you want that same solution, service, and product to be replicated as much as possible. Just as the recycling of materials is good for the environment, reuse is good for organizations because it minimizes rework, prevents problems, saves time, and accelerates progress.

Avoid redundant effort. No one likes to spend time doing something over again. But they do so all the time for a variety of reasons. Avoiding duplication of effort saves time and money, keeps employee morale up, and streamlines work. By not spending time reinventing the wheel, you can have more time to invent something new.

Prevent making the same mistakes twice. George Santayana said, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we will experience them over and over again. Knowledge services allows us to share lessons learned, not only about successes, but also about failures. In order to do so, we must have a culture of trust, openness, and rewarding willingness to talk about what we have done wrong. The potential benefits are enormous. If NASA learns why a space shuttle exploded, it can prevent recurrences and save lives. If FEMA learns what went wrong in responding to Hurricane Katrina, it can reduce the losses caused by future disasters. If engineers learn why highways and buildings collapsed during a previous earthquake, they can design new ones to better withstand future earthquakes. If you learn that your last bid or estimate was underestimated by 50%, you can make the next one more accurate and thus earn a healthy profit instead of incurring a large loss.

Take advantage of existing expertise and experience. Teams benefit from the individual skills and knowledge of each member. The more complementary the expertise of the team members, the greater the power of the team. In large organizations, there are people with widely varying capabilities and backgrounds, and there should be a benefit from this. But as the number of people increases, it becomes more difficult for each individual to know about everyone else. So, even though there are people with knowledge who could help other people, they don’t know about each other. The late Lew Plat...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Chapter 1 Vision and benefits for communities and knowledge services
• Chapter 2 Ten principles for communities
• Chapter 3 Creating, building, and sustaining communities
• Chapter 4 Types of communities
• Chapter 5 Use cases for communities
• Chapter 6 The community creation process
• Chapter 7 Preventing redundant communities
• Chapter 8 The role of the communities program manager
• Chapter 9 The role of the community manager
• Chapter 10 Community goals, measurements, and incentives
• Chapter 11 The 90-9-1 rule of thumb for community participation
• Chapter 12 Culture and communities
• Chapter 13 Tools for communities
• Chapter 14 Examples of communities
• Chapter 15 20 Pitfalls to avoid
• Appendix: Resources for learning more about communities
• Index